Mr. Jones

by Margaret Sweatman

  He drained the cup, poured more rum, returned to the veranda, and poked under a rain-stained wicker table with drawers filled with poker chips, playing cards and matches, a cribbage board, stray Scrabble pieces. Beneath the table was a pile of dusty magazines where he found a copy of Chatelaine 1953. A time of bliss, till solstice, that June when he’d learned that he would be investigated by the RCMP. But he had survived.

  He lived alone among men and alone among his loved ones. He had known this was his fate even as a boy, in the parody his father had made of his family, his father opening the stage to self-consciousness by introducing his other love, Sachiko. In the war, he’d fallen for the delusion of belonging to Bomber Command. That had been an ecstatic well-blooded belonging, cynically devised by the generals. He’d awoken from that delusion to the pain of knowing that he’d been manipulated. Yet he fell in love again, with John Norfield, with Leonard Fischer, with their rejection of ordinary ambition, their communism, a totally paradoxical belonging that would always counter its own definitions. Ich schlief, ich schlief — From a deep dream have I awoken.

  Norfield and Leonard’s communism required homelessness and the courage to live in that condition. Tonight, aloneness was painful because he was tired and he’d had too much to drink. Aloneness was his source of strength, his pride. Tonight it led to a sense of despair; tomorrow it might yield its private radiance. He could see things clearly only when he made himself awaken from the perpetual lure of belonging. Of longing to belong.

  He’d fallen in love with Suzanne knowing that she loved him in return only as a rational, hopeful, compensatory method of surviving the passion she felt for John. Emmett thought, Yes, I’m a fool. Being alive is foolish. I awaken from one dream only to fall into another. The constant in his series of errors and delusions was his abiding love for Suzanne and Lenore.

  He was looking at an article that he wouldn’t remember tomorrow. It was called, “The Pill That Could Change the World.” Then Lennie arrived smelling of lake water and slipped under his arm to lay her head on his chest and in her boy’s voice to ask him, “What are you reading?” She didn’t expect or wish him to answer, she didn’t give a damn what he was reading, she was giving him attention. He experienced the melting joy of a rehabilitated criminal.

  Lennie sprawled with elaborate kindness across his lap. She had a quick gag reflex, and her father smelled of man. It was her duty to touch him with her wings.

  He tossed aside Chatelaine to stroke his daughter’s cool bare arm.

  Chapter Six

  Emmett awoke the next day to a perfectly windless Saturday morning and discovered Suzanne gone from their rumpled bed. A white-throated sparrow sang its six notes. He had a hangover. Again. It wasn’t such a severe hangover that it wouldn’t be expelled by a swim. Outside in bright sunlight, his body was white in his swimming trunks, his bare feet on the cool stone stairs looked fungal, the skin puffy and premature.

  Lenore and Suzanne were sitting on the dock wearing big and small versions of the same hat, straw with silk roses, their skin golden, their eyes as clear as the lake reflecting granite and pine boughs that rippled with the morning sun. He passed them and dived.

  He was a foreigner here, a city creature, but his girls were lulled, he could see, creatures of Lethe mesmerized by pleasure, by peaceful boredom, rolling aside to let father-fish flop onto their towel stiff from drying in the sun. Suzanne put her finger into the beads of water on his freckling shoulder and murmured, “You’ll burn.”

  She was relaxed, she wasn’t thinking about John, she was his again. He couldn’t sit or settle so he prepared a big breakfast that she and Lennie consumed as if this were simply a phase of their own photosynthesis.

  Lennie still avoided eggs but put away a bushel of berries and a half loaf of bread. Chewing, she reached to put her palm to his chin and rubbed at the shadow there. “You’re priggly.” Her nose was plugged; it husked her voice.

  “What if you get born a raspberry?” Emmett asked.

  Lennie wouldn’t answer a question that was negligently aimed at her cosmology. Saucily, she sighed and asked him, “What if you get born a robin? What if you get born a dragonfly? What if you get born a ladybug, what if you get born a bee, what if you get born an ant?”

  Rising with the plates, he asked her, “What were you before you were born?” The look of dread on her face made him hurriedly clear the table, sorry.

  Suzanne’s stomach was taut; he could see the muscle through her bathing suit. She’d put on one of his tattered white shirts to come to breakfast and now she let it fall open as she leaned back in her chair and pushed her plate toward him, crossing her tanned legs. “That was good.” Unfazed. Her blue eyes full of light. Then while he was filling the sink, she came behind him and wrapped her warm body around his back. “Why don’t you take a break,” she offered and nudged him out of the way.

  They’d had a storm that had ripped some shingle off the boathouse. He looked among the debris stored under the cottage to find a package of spare shingles and began to set himself up to make the repair. He thought about his son, James, and the life he was leading without his father. He wondered what it would be like to have a boy about the place, and whether the money was getting to Aoi, who never wrote back.

  He discovered that a joist had rotted, which led to another search to discover some dry lumber stacked on a canoe rack and wrapped in a canvas tarp. Caterpillars had sewn white sacs to the canvas, it smelled sweet with mildew, he pulled the pliable silk cocoons off with his hands. Wild rose grew here, under the deck, in the parallel lines of sun shining through, they scratched his bare legs with their thorns.

  He hauled a four-by-six from under the cottage and then found the handsaw and carried it all down to the dock. The saw was dull, the job took forever, and he had to stop for a beer when he was halfway through, partly from thirst and partly to put out the fire that burned in his head.

  It was nearly time for lunch, but he got the paint-splattered stepladder from the shed and carried it inside the boathouse to position it beside the boat slips where Suzanne’s runabout and the nine-horse were moored. The gulping sound of the boats when waves rolled in. Sweet golden shade rippling. With his dull saw, he began to cut away the rotted wood.

  The lumber was soggy but nice to touch, fibres coming loose in his hands, splinters of ruddy blond wood softened by the rains. It smelled good in there. Jerry cans of gas and tins of outboard motor oil. At his left ear poised a leathery black spider the size of a small mouse. The portion of rotten wood fell into his hands.

  “Whatcha doin’?” Lennie stood at the doorway to the boathouse, peering in.

  “Fixing the roof.” He looked down where she stood in a hot slab of sunlight, her T-shirt a sweet pink against the bleached wood of the dock and the blue water behind her. He was enchanted by her lucidity, her remotely attuned attention; she was a tuning fork.

  She inhaled the rich fumy shade. “How come you’re fixing the roof if you’re standing inside?” She sighed patiently. “Anyways, Mum says it’s lunch.”

  He leaned from his stepladder and handed Lennie the soggy piece of pine, which she accepted without flinching. “What am I supposed to do with this?”

  “Put it under your pillow.”

  They went up to the cottage for lunch. Lennie pondered his suggestion. She didn’t like to ask for clarification. He worried that this was something that might cause her trouble later in life, a competitive streak that could make her reject her teachers. She still carried the rotten wood; it was smearing her T-shirt. He took it from her. “Here,” he said, “I’ll throw it on the wood pile.”

  “You were kidding about putting it under my pillow, right?”

  “Yup.”

  “I knew you were.”

  They had lunch in the veranda, where it was cooler. Suzanne remained calmly abstracted. He wanted to interfere with her. His young daughter swung her legs under her chair and hummed tunelessly while she devoured an entire cucumber.r />
  Chapter Seven

  “It’s all right,” Suzanne said irritably, “it’s absolutely fine and dandy.”

  A cool Thanksgiving Monday and they were closing the cottage. Emmett handed down to the boat another box of foodstuff that they didn’t want to leave in the cupboards for the winter. “It’s heavy,” he told her, but she ignored him and nearly dropped the box. Her girlhood was especially evident in the way she performed tasks like this, the lake chores that she’d been performing all her life. She slid her jacket off and swung her arms toward him to receive the next load.

  Another trade junket had come up for Emmett. He’d been given an assignment, another grease-the-wheel junket with some fellows from Trade and Commerce. This time to Japan.

  The trip coincided with Emmett’s desire to see his son, James. And it followed closely Robert Morton’s unusual disclosure of the “Jones Files,” with its casual inclusion of a photograph of the boy. Bill Masters had gurgled with pleasure in giving him the news of the impending trip, pretending that this was exactly what Jones had been asking for, as if it were a foreign posting and not another trade mission. Not another set-up.

  Though Emmett didn’t know if the Japan trip really was a play by External’s Security section, another test of his loyalty. Maybe he was being paranoid. Bill Masters’s happy croaking could be real. Two Canadian companies were selling technical knowledge to Kobe Steel Works. Emmett was the only man at External who knew Kobe Japan and could act as interpreter. That’s why he’d been chosen to go along. That’s how Bill Masters had phrased it.

  Now Emmett was saying to Suzanne, “I’d like it better if you and Lennie were coming with me,” but he didn’t mean it. He didn’t know what his real role was going to be in Japan, but he knew it wasn’t Husband.

  Suzanne said, “I don’t want Lennie to know about you and — Japan.”

  “She’s got to know where I am.” He had a terror of disappearing from Lennie’s life when she didn’t know where he was.

  “Why?”

  “Why? Why would you ask me something like that?”

  “It’ll upset her.”

  “It’s only business, Suzanne.”

  “And family. It’s your family, Emmett. Yours. Not mine.”

  “It’s Lennie’s family too.” He heaved a box of leftover liquor toward her.

  Suzanne, stricken, let the box drop to the floorboards. A crack. The smell of gin.

  He cursed quietly. He’d been thinking this, an angry sentence in his own head: It’s my son, as Lenore is my daughter.

  Lennie’s voice from the lawn, “What are you two fighting about anyways?”

  “We’re not fighting.” Mother and Father in unison. Then he said, “I have to go to Japan.”

  Suzanne sat down, that gesture: I’m washing my hands of the whole affair.

  “Now?” Lennie asked.

  “Next week.”

  “Are you going to go get James?”

  “No. I’m not. James lives with his mother in Kobe. And he’s going to want to stay there.”

  “What if he wants to come home with you?”

  “He won’t want to. He wouldn’t want to leave his mother, would he?”

  Lenore glanced at her mother, considering. “I don’t know. I don’t know his mother.”

  Suzanne asked whether or not Lenore had packed all her Enid Blyton books.

  “Can we swim before we go to the city?” Lennie asked, deflecting.

  “It’ll be cold.”

  “I know.” Lennie stomped down the stairs to the dock, peeling off her clothes, standing shivering in her underwear. “Come on.”

  She would be a marriage counsellor, he imagined a moment later, treading water in the icy lake with Lennie and Suzanne, exhilarated, the argument on hold.

  Her lips were turning blue. Suzanne herded her toward the ladder. “Time to get out.”

  “Why aren’t we coming?” Lennie asked.

  “It’s too expensive.” This was more or less true. “I wish you were coming, you and your mother. But we can’t afford it.”

  “It’s around the world,” Suzanne said. She was being helpful. “It would cost way too much for us to go with Daddy.”

  Lenore hadn’t called him Daddy since she was three so she knew her mother was lying.

  “You can send James a letter with Daddy.”

  “Don’t call him Daddy.”

  Chapter Eight

  Before dawn on the morning of his departure for Japan, Emmett descended the stairs of his home in Ottawa. It was cold. He wore pyjama bottoms. His upper body and feet were bare. He went to the kitchen, to the drawer where they kept candles and a flashlight in case of blackouts, and removed the flashlight. Then he went to the hall cupboard and got his coat and went out by the back door to the garage, entering by the crooked wooden door.

  They normally squeezed the Alfa Romeo in beside the new Parisienne. A couple of days ago, he’d noticed a scratch in the Alfa’s paint and had persuaded Suzanne to take it in for bodywork, arguing that they should get it repaired while he was out of the country. He didn’t like for Suzanne to be noticeable when he wasn’t here to watch out for her, and the Parisienne would be harder to follow.

  In the concrete floor of the old garage, mostly obscured by a patch of oil that had leaked from the old car, was a latch. He bent down and tugged at it. A bit of dirt and oil shifted. He yanked harder and a door lifted, a hatch. He laid the hatch back on the floor of the garage and shone the flashlight down. It was like a root cellar, though it wasn’t intended for turnips and potatoes but for liquor; a wine cellar built during Prohibition.

  He climbed backward down the narrow wooden stairs to the cellar, his hand groping the damp walls till he found a piece of string wrapped around a nail; he gave the string a pull and a bulb lit up. He laid the flashlight on one of the empty shelves. It smelled of mud in here. The walls of the cellar were made of red brick. On a pallet raised from the floor was a wood barrel stamped with the Seagram’s insignia. The lid of the barrel sat askew. He slid the lid aside and set it against the barrel. The top layer was straw. Beneath that was his old tripod, placed over a waterproof satchel. He put the tripod and the satchel aside and leaned into the barrel.

  When Robert Morton had put Emmett’s files into his hands more than three months ago, Morton had instructed Grey, the rabbity little man who cried in the sun, to take Emmett home. Morton had stayed behind, as had the two plainclothes officers there to witness the delivery of the subject’s files. A rare event, such generous disclosure; quite out of the ordinary. En route from the reclusive old house with its groundskeeper’s cottage where this last interview had taken place, Grey had engaged Emmett in an odd conversation.

  As they drove the several miles, Grey, his face squeezed against the sunlight, sweating in his oversized wool suit, had grown increasingly agitated. He kept looking in the rear-view mirror at Emmett in the backseat. He removed his hat, ran his hand over sparse blond hair, and finally said, “He’s just letting you go.”

  Emmett said that yes, he was going home. He didn’t feel confident in Grey’s driving, being so blinded by light. He asked him, “You remember the way?”

  Grey didn’t answer. After several minutes Grey repeated in a tone of incredulity, “Just like that. He fucking lets you go.”

  Now it was Emmett’s turn to be unresponsive. The leather briefcase was heavy on his lap, and he embraced it even while he knew it was meaningless; there would be duplicates with the RCMP, triplicates with the FBI. The files were merely mementos. Grey was muttering, “He lets you go, he fucking lets you go.”

  When the black Buick finally rolled onto Emmett’s street, he instructed Grey not to pull up at the front door of his house but to take him around, down the lane, and drop him off at the back gate. But Grey ignored him and pulled up out front, and then, as if this would further injure Emmett, he pulled into the driveway, braking with a sudden lurch.

  Emmett couldn’t get out of the car without Grey’
s assistance because there was no door handle. Grey turned in his seat to look at him. “You make me sick,” he said.

  “Open the door and we’ll part ways.”

  “I want to puke when I look at you.”

  “Open the door.”

  “I fought for my country,” Grey said. “I nearly got killed. Buddies of mine, they got killed.”

  “Yeah, well, it was a war.”

  Now Grey’s tears seemed caused by grief. He said, “I nearly lost my balls in the fight for freedom.”

  Emmett smiled a little. “Open the door.”

  “Faggot.”

  “Sticks and stones.”

  “Commie faggot.”

  “Lieutenant Morton will be expecting you to report that you got me here safely. Are you sure you can find your way back?”

  “Morton?” Grey scoffed. “I got a more important boss than that dumb fuck.”

  “Sure you do.”

  “What do you know about it?”

  “Nothing. Only, you have ambitions.” Grey began to listen with that greed to be known by another. Emmett said, “You go way beyond this town. You’re even working with men outside the country. The RCMP don’t know about all the work you’re doing. Important work. For freedom.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Morton told me.”

  “He doesn’t know!”

  Emmett smiled.

  Grey wiped the tears from the side of his face. “I should shoot you. Not right now. When the time is right.”

  “Open the door.”

  “I should shoot your whole family.”

  “Open the door. I’ll take my souvenirs and you’ll never see me again.”

  “Oh. Don’t worry. I’ll see you again.” Grey got out of the car. He was coming around, sullen and frustrated to have to let Jones go free, when the door to the house opened and Suzanne rushed out. Lenore tried to follow her and Suzanne shrieked at her to go back, pushing her inside the house and then stumbling down the front steps. She was weeping. She stopped cold when she saw Grey standing between her and the car and cried, “Give me back my husband!”