Mr. Jones

by Margaret Sweatman

  “1949, I guess.”

  “Be precise.”

  “It was fall of 1949. He’d been ill. Look. No one was close to John.”

  “Except for your wife,” said Robert Morton.

  “Suzanne was young and naive.” Then he added tightly to Gembey, “My wife has nothing to do with this.”

  “From 1946 to 1949,” Morton said, speaking as if he were referring to notes but his hands were empty and he studied his diamond ring, “Suzanne McCallum, as she was known then, had an affair with John Norfield that he broke off. Norfield disappeared, like smoke.” Morton made a sympathetic face. “She was troubled for a while. She saw a psychiatrist, from October through December. An expensive head doctor, hired by her father. Her daddy set her up in a shop, selling pictures. And then you lost your job in Tokyo, came home, and she married you.”

  “She’s none of your business,” Emmett said, then, to Gembey, “We have a child, for chrissake.”

  Morton smiled, amused to see Emmett rattled. Emmett put his empty glass down at his feet and sat back in his chair, taking a breath.

  At eight-thirty, though it was still hot in the house, he announced that he was chilly, excused himself, and went upstairs to change his clothes. He sat down on the bed and used the phone on the bedside table. It was a poor connection. Suzanne, through the crackling line, kept asking, “What’s wrong?” He told her that he’d changed his mind, he was coming down tonight. Late. He instructed her to go now, before it got too dark, tow the small outboard behind her inboard runabout and leave it for him at the landing. He told her he loved her and hung up. He’d started to change his clothes when he noticed that the bedroom door, which he was convinced that he had closed, was now open. Partridge was standing at the doorway. “After you,” Partridge said, and Emmett walked past him, back downstairs, Partridge at his back.

  Robert Morton raised his eyebrows when Emmett returned still wearing shorts but made no comment.

  Gembey seemed disgusted. He wanted to get this over with. He waved his hands, indicating that it was time to get down to brass tacks. “There’s something we need to establish very clearly, Emmett. Are you or were you ever a member of the Communist Party?”

  “No.”

  Gembey looked relieved and left the room. They could hear the tap running in the kitchen. Gembey was getting himself a glass of water. Emmett wanted another drink. And he was hungry. He’d had a sandwich at his desk before noon, nothing since.

  Robert Morton moved to sit close to him, and in a low voice he said, “You’ve lied to me before.” Gembey returned and Morton moved away, saying, “And your Jewish pal, Leonard Fischer, you’re claiming he never contacts you?”

  “No.”

  Morton shook his head. “You really stuck your neck out for that jerk.” Now Morton seemed to be angry at Leonard, the one who got away. He said, “How about your wife? She still in touch with John Norfield?”

  Gembey cut him off: “She’s not our territory, Morton.”

  “She hasn’t seen him in years,” Emmett said quickly to Morton, but he knew he sounded too defensive. He had to protect Suzanne. She was innocent, naive, he had to shield her.

  Morton continued, “Did she know that Norfield is a communist?”

  “Everyone at the University of Toronto after the war either knew a communist or pretended to be one.”

  “Now that sounds like an exaggeration.”

  “It’s true. I guess you weren’t there.”

  Partridge finally spoke. “You seem to think this inquiry is merely a personal matter, Mr. Jones.”

  “Norfield was a POW in Hong Kong. That’s the most important thing about him. Everything else is an after-effect.”

  Toward ten o’clock, the interview got general: what was Jones’s attitude toward the Soviet Union? Emmett reminded them that his field was Southeast Asia. “Yes, of course,” Gembey said, “we know that. What we’re trying to get at is more central.”

  “Wait a sec,” Robert Morton interrupted. “Let’s follow this for a moment. ‘Mao Zedong has been China’s future since the Long March.’ Does that ring a bell?”

  Emmett said, “No.”

  “They’re your words.”

  Emmett, seated in one of the Louis Quinze chairs Suzanne had inherited from her grandmother, was thinking, Mao is China’s future, Chairman Mao has been China’s past, present, and future since 1943. He said, “Turns out it’s true,” and then, to Gembey, “It’s not treason to know this fact.”

  Robert Morton came and stood over him, jingling change in his pocket. “You were — disillusioned — with the Americans’ support of Chiang Kai-shek.” Then, in a simpering voice, “‘a symptom of ignorant imperialism.’” Morton turned on his heel and leaned to speak exclusively to Partridge, “‘If the kind reader will forgive a redundancy.’” Partridge smirked.

  Emmett understood then, the words belonged to him, but it seemed impossible that he’d ever talked like that. Ignorant imperialism, yes, but kind reader? “I was young when I wrote that.” He remembered. He’d written an opinion piece in the student newspaper, The Varsity, when he was studying Asia at the University of Toronto.

  “Not that young,” Morton said.

  “Yeah. Not that young.” He’d been twenty-six. Not young.

  Harold Gembey said dismissively to Robert Morton, “I don’t want to weigh too heavily on something he wrote in a university newspaper.”

  “You still a fan of Mao Zedong?” Robert Morton asked.

  “I’m not a fan of anybody.”

  “Mass murderer, Mao,” Morton quietly observed.

  Gembey said impatiently, “Let’s move on,” and asked, “You were recalled from your job at the Canadian Liaison Mission in Japan. Why?”

  Emmett guessed that the RCMP was supposed to be taking a backseat in an internal inquiry. He answered Gembey. “Bill Masters wanted me back in Ottawa.”

  Morton clicked his tongue. “You were close pals with the diplomat fellow, Herbert Norman. Both of you were recalled from Tokyo.” He added wonderingly, “You have the strangest taste in friends.” Partridge barked a laugh. Gembey let it stand, maybe glad someone else had put that on the table, Emmett Jones’s association with the diplomat, Herbert Norman, recalled from Japan just prior to Emmett’s recall, a man always shadowed by suspicion of being a traitor, in league with the communists.

  “Yes,” Emmett said. “I worked with him in Tokyo three years ago, when I was stationed there during the Korean War.” He went to pour himself a third or was it his fourth drink. “Herbert Norman has been cleared,” he said, pouring whisky.

  A diplomat, a scholar of Japanese history, Herbert Norman was a close friend of Lester Pearson, minister of external affairs. After Herbert was cleared, it was likely Pearson who got him promoted to head the American and Far Eastern division of External. The following year, Herbert had been sent to Washington as the Canadian representative to the United Nations. Then the US Internal Security Subcommittee went after him a second time, and within six months the Americans had pushed the RCMP and External — that would be Morton and Gembey — to interrogate him on suspicion of disloyalty — to Canada, to the US. Again, he was “cleared.” Now he’d been sent to New Zealand. Exile. Dry dock. His career probably ruined.

  Emmett could hear Morton give a little chuckle behind his back while he drank.

  When Emmett hit the road, it was nearly midnight and he was pretty drunk. He’d taken over the Alfa Romeo from Suzanne’s father that summer, and now he had the top down. When he left the city lights behind him, he began to talk to himself, over the winding road to Blue Sea Lake. It was about three in the morning when he arrived and took the small outboard across. He docked the boat by starlight, made his way up the stone stairs, and discovered Suzanne sitting in the dark veranda. She remained where she was and looked up at him. “It’s started, hasn’t it,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  A deep groan rose from her, but she kept her eyes steadily on his. “Would it
be — acceptable — to you, if I asked you to forgive me?”

  Emmett didn’t know what needed to be forgiven, and disliked her for assuming that this was all about her. They weren’t investigating her; he would use all his strength to make sure that they would never go after her for her relationship with John Norfield. He was too tired, but he went listlessly to put his arms around her and said, “It’s all right. I’ll take care of it.” He didn’t tell her that John Norfield had been arrested in England, and that he’d been let go. Maybe tomorrow he would tell her, but now he was tired.

  She pushed him out of the way, sobbing so loudly he tried to quiet her. “Shhh,” thinking of Lennie, “shhh.”

  Suzanne kept repeating, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” She ran outside. He could see her white bathrobe on the path down to the dock, could hear her weeping. She disappeared behind the trees and then he saw her standing on the rocks by the lake.

  He went back inside, to Lenore’s room. It seemed far longer than five days since he’d held his baby girl. Lennie’s bedroom at the cottage was behind the kitchen. It was painted light blue and had screened windows on three sides. The leaves soughed in the wind, the shadows of their boughs moving all over. It was crazy to put her here alone in such a wildering world. She was awake, lying on her back in her crib, looking at him with those sombre grey eyes. He collected her, gathering her into his arms with a shawl around her, kissing her neck, inhaling her, “Hey, sweet baby, hey, little girl,” crooning to her, but inside his head, he was talking to Gembey, to Morton, he’d never stop talking to them. “I’ll be true to you,” he whispered to his baby. Gembey had wanted to know, when was the last time he’d seen John Norfield. And he remembered.

  Chapter Three

  September 1949

  Norfield had phoned and asked him to come, so he went and found John in the back room of his bookstore, seated with a black notebook in his hand. John lifted a face swollen, yellow, sweating, clammy. He’d been sick to his stomach in his little bathroom at the back and the whole place stank. John lifted a shaky hand and said, “Thank you,” and put the notebook in a drawer, as if relinquishing a duty. Then he went to the back and Emmett could hear water in the sink; John was washing his hands. When he returned, he walked past Emmett, fumbled with the door to his shop, and went out. “Please lock it,” John said, handing him the key, the sweat on his face slick and acrid-smelling. “I might be gone awhile.”

  Emmett hailed a cab and helped John into the backseat, where he lay down. Emmett got into the front beside the cabbie, who asked nervously, “What’s the matter with your friend?”

  John’s muffled voice came from the backseat, “Nothing that will hurt you.”

  Emmett took him to St. Michael’s Hospital, and stayed while John was admitted, waiting in the hallway all afternoon till he snagged a doctor and asked if he could see him. “Are you family?” the doctor wanted to know. Emmett said that he was his brother and was let in.

  John made an effort to sit up when Emmett entered the room — a show of dignity, or self-defence.

  Emmett had never witnessed John’s bouts of illness, hadn’t realized they could be this severe, though he knew that John still suffered from some infection, a parasite contracted in the POW camp in Japan, and that he’d sometimes retreat from his friends for a week or more, avoid even Suzanne. Emmett would learn from Suzanne that John was ill when she’d phone and ask him if he could go for a walk, for coffee, and he’d gladly keep her company, despite the pain it caused him to see her so obsessed with Norfield. Now he asked John, “Do you want me to let Suzanne know?” John wearily shook his head, no. “Not till I’m clean,” he said.

  Emmett spent most of the next three days at the hospital, reading the newspaper to John, or sitting with a book while John slept. He enjoyed this interlude, and John seemed grateful — he’d never known John to be so receptive.

  On the fourth day, John asked him to bring a radio, and Emmett went out to buy one. When he returned to the hospital room, John was hanging up the phone, and now he regarded Emmett with that ironic grin, and Emmett knew that their relations were back to what they’d been before.

  They were sitting on the bed, tuning the radio when Suzanne pushed open the door to Norfield’s room. Emmett saw her cream-coloured shoes, her shapely legs, a low-cut cream-coloured dress and a cream-coloured hat of some kind, like a Sultan. She seemed embarrassed. She looked beautiful and also silly and that seemed to make her mad. He stood, trying not to look too hard. She held a tremulous pose, a cream leather handbag slung over one arm, an unlit cigarette in the other hand. Her lovely voice, “Hello, boys.” Emmett thought she must be trying to look like Barbara Stanwyck or somebody like that; he found her more beautiful than Stanwyck, as beautiful as Lana Turner.

  Norfield raised one knee under his bedclothes. Suzanne came to stand at the foot of his bed, biting her lip against whatever it was she wanted to say. Finally she put her cigarette into her handbag, took off the silly hat, and said bitterly, “Thanks for letting me know,” throwing the purse onto the bed. “I see you two are getting along fine.” And then, “Goddamn it, I was scared.”

  “Of what?” John said.

  “You just disappeared.” She calmed herself, she wouldn’t dare ask much of him. “Anyway,” she said, “are you all right?”

  John said he was. Emmett thought, He actually does love her or he would never let her see him vulnerable, in a dishevelled hospital bed. Then John held up his hand: “Shhh.” He turned up the radio.

  They heard a tinny voice announcing, “Russia has the atom secret.” Suzanne made a movement with her head, a pony yanking at the bit. Norfield’s hand went up again, and she calmed. The voice was going on about “the grim vision of an atomic war that would leave complete desolation in its wake.”

  “It’s Truman,” said Norfield. “The Russians have the Bomb.”

  Suzanne asked, “Are they just going to blow up the world?”

  Emmett was curious to see if John would celebrate the Russians’ new “atomic secret.”

  Suzanne, too, was watching John’s face. John looked closed in on himself, as if he wanted her to leave. “Well,” she said, “I guess it levels the playing field.”

  Norfield twisted slightly, as if her opinion disappointed him, as if she made him disappointed in himself. His skin was yellow. Emmett knew it was his liver, damaged by dysentery in the Japanese camp. A shabby type of war wound. John had been an active soldier for less than three weeks before being taken prisoner for nearly four years. Emmett thought that John needed to keep the battle going; the war wasn’t over for him and never would be.

  President Truman had finished talking, and an announcer was asking, “Will man destroy himself?”

  Chapter Four

  When Suzanne visited Norfield in his apartment, she didn’t know that their words and sounds were being recorded. But Norfield did. He said almost nothing.

  Suzanne liked John’s hands and his feet, the rare smile, his shirts, his smell, his scars, his reticence. She didn’t know that Robert Morton of the RCMP could hear the sighs she uttered, or the way she whispered John’s name, calling him, her lips pressed to his throat, his tender, determined silence.

  “Hello,” she liked to whisper in a kiss, “hello.” She never felt sure that she was in the same picture as he was; she felt she was experiencing something parallax, disjointed from him. She was always shocked to see him; he left an after-image of his diffident, lonely posture, his distracted way of walking, slightly pigeon-toed.

  And somewhere, deeply, innately, in John’s makeup, there was money. He didn’t make a show of it; he lived simply, worked steadily, selling books. Many evenings she found him in his tastefully under-furnished apartment, seated at his kitchen table, writing poetry that he hid with his hand before closing the notebook. Then he’d open a good bottle of wine and cook a couple of pepper steaks. His wardrobe was limited, but it was comprised of good dress shirts and a couple of cashmere sweaters. She’d never seen
a hole in his socks. His cigarette lighter was sterling silver, well polished. He never talked about money. He was always clean, he smelled of Scotch and cigarettes, raw onions, soap, and some kind of oil he liked, made of crushed seeds.

  Norfield’s middle- or even upper-class fingerprint made Suzanne comfortable around him, even though she expected to be chilled. She wanted to prove strong enough to sustain his disinterest. He wasn’t an ardent lover, and this was modern. She believed that she lived in an age of enlightenment.

  While Hong Kong might have been John Norfield’s defining experience, Suzanne McCallum’s was a movie she’d seen five years ago, in 1944. Double Indemnity, starring Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray. Though it wasn’t Barbara Stanwyck who inspired the cream wardrobe, the turban that Suzanne wore to visit John Norfield while he was in the hospital with his liver; it was Lana Turner in The Postman Always Rings Twice. The two actresses mixed in Suzanne’s mind, for sexiness, for cunning. She once said to John, “I’m rotten to the heart, baby,” but he didn’t laugh.

  Suzanne was only seventeen when she went to see Double Indemnity with her father. Until the last few minutes of that movie, it would never have occurred to her that a man would enjoy the embrace of a beautiful woman and then shoot her, twice. The force of those gunshots threw Suzanne back in her seat so hard her father leaned over to comfort her, cursing himself for having brought her there.

  Fred MacMurray’s surprising gesture, his hand with the gun thrust into Barbara Stanwyck’s silk pyjamas, became Suzanne’s nearly subliminal point of reference, an image she recalled for a fraction of a second when life would disclose its underlying violence. It was her initial reaction to Fred MacMurray’s sudden act during an intimate moment, her first shock, that she brought to mind, to remind herself that she had once been naive. She thought that her womanhood dated from that moment.