by Wayne Grady
“Tell me about your parents, Jack,” she said. “What kind of people are they?”
He shrugged. “They’re nothing special.”
“They’re special to me, they’re my parents-in-law.”
“Maybe,” he said, “but after this trip you won’t be seeing much of them.”
“Why not?”
He looked up. “Because they’ll be in Windsor and we’ll be somewhere else.”
He had a way of making the most outlandish things sound logical, and then getting all riled up when she didn’t go along with him. It frightened her.
“I’d still like to hear about them.”
He turned another page of the magazine and spent some time looking at an advertisement for laundry soap.
“Are they nice people? Not so nice people?” she persisted. “What kind of house do they live in? What’s your mother like?”
“You’ll find out soon enough,” he said.
“But I want you to tell me.”
“All right,” he said, sighing and closing the magazine. “They’re like your folks. They live in a big house in a nice part of town, bigger than Iris and Freddie’s. Brick, with a big front porch with a swing on it. There’s a living room on the ground floor, but they only use it when they have guests, like that room in your parents’ house. Their parlour’s on the second floor, at the top of the stairs.”
He paused. How odd, she thought, to have a parlour on the second floor. “Do you mean like a sitting room?”
“Not a room, really, more like a big space with some chairs and a coffee table, but that’s where they spend most of their time. Mom knits and listens to the radio. She’s small but she’s a real fighter, wears herself out doing charity work all day, belongs to lots of clubs. She likes listening to Amos ’n’ Andy in the evenings, you don’t get that in St. John’s, and George Burns and Gracie Allen. I sit up there with her sometimes after dinner. Through the windows you can look down over the tops of the chestnut trees and see the Detroit River, and Detroit on the other side of it. Now that the war’s over the barrage balloons will be gone and at night the skyline will be lit up like a Christmas tree. You never seen such tall buildings. I told you me and my sister Alvina used to go there to hear the big bands and watch movies in the Fox Theatre.”
“What’s your sister like?”
“Alvina?” he said, leaning back in his seat. “She’s big, and blonde, like Dad and Benny. She’s twelve years older than me. I take more after my mother.”
“And Benny?”
This was what she wanted, this was the intimacy she craved. She didn’t know why she’d practically had to force it, but once he started it was like music pouring out of him.
“He and my father don’t get along, maybe because they’re too much alike. Benny’s taller than me, blond hair, blue eyes with brown flecks in them, never seen that in anyone else except my father. Women go crazy over him. He’s got his own place now, just around the corner from my folks’ house. They’ll probably give us his old room at the back of the house on the ground floor. The sun pours into it in the morning and you can walk out of it into the backyard.”
“What about your father?” she prompted.
“What about my father?”
He paused again, longer this time. “He wears expensive suits with a white handkerchief tucked in the breast pocket that he never uses, just for show, see? He always smells like talcum powder and aftershave. His father was a barber, but he’s dead now, has been for years. Granddad used to take me to the Detroit Zoo and Tiger Stadium, and Belle Isle, where people go when it gets too hot in town. Windsor’s the hottest place in Canada, did you know that? It’s always summer, never snows, they got trees that never lose their leaves, and flowers growing in the middle of January.”
“You were talking about your father,” she said gently.
“Dad was already in the construction business when I came along. He started out with one truck, with ‘W. H. Lewis and Son’ painted on it. When I was born he added the ‘s’ to make it ‘Sons.’ ”
He looked out the window, and for a second she was afraid he was finished. Then he shrugged, as though a second conversation was going on in his head, one she couldn’t be part of.
“When my father and Benny have a big job they have to be careful who they hire. Windsor’s a working-class town and there’s a huge coloured population. Coloureds’ll steal the shirt off your back. They take things from my father, paint and plaster and stuff to fix up their own shacks with, and they steal from the house owners. Stupid things, like shampoo, or kids’ toys, or that book of yours. There are some parts of the city you can’t go into because of them.”
“What do they do?”
“Are you kidding? They’d slit your throat as soon as look at you. Those people carry knives.”
He retreated into silence after that, but she felt close to him. He had constructed a bridge between them. She reached across and took his hand and squeezed it, blinking back tears. He smiled at her tightly, but his eyes were soft.
When the train pulled into Toronto, it was nearly midnight and she couldn’t see anything of the city. The connection to Windsor didn’t leave until six in the morning. Jack didn’t want to leave Union Station. She suggested they put their bags in a locker and go for a walk, get something to eat, see the city, have an adventure, but Jack insisted it was too late, that everything would be closed and the streets would be too dangerous so late at night. Station employees had copies of all the locker keys, he said, and they went through people’s luggage looking for valuables.
“This is the real world, kid, not some Fairy Land.”
“We don’t have any valuables,” she said, but they sat on a wooden bench, curled up under their coats, for the whole six hours. This isn’t the real world, she thought. In front of them was a kiosk that sold books and magazines, but it was closed and wouldn’t open until nine. She leaned her head on her husband’s shoulder and gazed through the wire grille at the titles—there was The Razor’s Edge, its pitch-black spine with white lettering perched just out of reach behind the iron screen.
On the train in the morning he barely spoke to her. Something terrible seemed to be going on in his head, but what it was she couldn’t fathom. They were in a coach, the tight, red plush seats like those in a theatre rubbing the backs of her legs. Twice they were shunted onto sidings while cargo trains roared by importantly in the opposite direction. Jack barely seemed to notice them.
“Jack, you will show me the tunnel when we get there?” she said, trying to cheer him up. “The one that goes under the river to the United States?”
“Sure, doll,” he said without enthusiasm. “All the old haunts.”
Just before noon the conductor hurried down the aisle calling “Windsor!” as though the city’s name were a warning. Five minutes later the train began passing scrap-metal yards, the backs of unpainted houses with their weathered stoops and sooty windowpanes, grey laundry sagging in the yards. Windsor was so much duller than the other cities they had seen, duller even than Sydney, not at all the balmy metropolis Jack had described to her. A physical pall hung over everything, the station, the streets, the river, even the people, all of whom seemed to have come down to the station to meet someone they didn’t like.
She looked at Jack. He was staring out at the faces in the crowd, looking terrified.
My poor, poor darling, she thought. What have I done to you?
PART II
WILLIAM HENRY
After driving into town from Walkerville, Benny parked the truck near the corner of Sandwich East and Ouellette, not exactly in front of the British-American Hotel but close enough by. The sidewalks were unusually busy for a Monday, especially down by the ferry dock, where people were pushing and shoving like something was being handed out for free. Coloureds and whites. William Henry always felt uneasy when he saw a crowd acting agitated. Benny noticed it, too.
“What’s goin’ on down there?”
�
�Nothin’ good,” William Henry said.
They entered the hotel through the side door off Ouellette, which would take them past the barbershop. Harlan was cutting a customer’s hair and William Henry waved at him through the glass, come and have a drink, and Harlan raised his scissors and comb, soon as I’m done here. William Henry and Benny continued across the lobby towards the open tavern door.
“Morning, Betsy,” William Henry said to the coloured clerk at the front desk.
“Afternoon, Mr. Lewis,” she said. “Benny.”
Fast Eddy must have seen them coming, because he had four glasses of draught on their table before they even sat down. Benny went to the bar and bought a pack of Buckinghams. There were three or four other men in the place, all sitting at different tables, but none of them looked up as William Henry took his work hat off and hung it on a hook on the wall. He was never one to drink with his hat on, it seemed too impermanent.
William Henry loved this room, settled into it like a tired foot into an old shoe. In his dream house, the entire ground floor would be this tavern, with the same terrazzo floor and a dozen round tables, each with four captain’s chairs around it, a bar running along one wall and Fast Eddy in constant attendance. In this dream tavern, the beer was always cold, the salt flowed freely from the shaker, and nothing ever changed. Friends dropped in for drinks and sat silently at their tables, each absorbed in his own thoughts or not, as the case might be. There were no windows, or maybe windows made of hollow glass bricks. The air was thick with tobacco smoke. Most of the light in the room came from behind the bar, reflected off a long mirror like the one Harlan had in his barbershop. The sawdust on the floor was from sawn white pine or cedar. No distinctions were made between night and day, winter and summer, these dark days of the war and the glory days of the Depression. The war was not a constant topic of discussion, and being out of work was not a disgrace.
He would have his regular table in the corner, far from the door to the men’s room and the radio above the bar. Only he and Harlan and Benny would sit at this table, and Jackson if he wanted to, but he wouldn’t want to. Jackson would think he was too good to sit in a tavern with the likes of his father and brother and uncle. He would want to bring his white friends in. They would treat Fast Eddy like a servant. They would not like his insouciance, and Fast Eddy would not like their sass. And that would be the end of William Henry’s dream home.
The British-American was where William Henry had lived for the month after Jackson was born, in the tavern during the day and on the floor of Harlan’s room upstairs at night. He would sit here from opening to closing, drinking and nurturing his hatred for the world in general and for whoever had fathered Josie’s bastard son in particular. It could have been that fat Polack who lived behind them in the brown house on Windsor Avenue; he would check the wooden fence between their yards for a hidden gate or signs of scaling. Or it could have been the sheeny who drove his horse and cart up and down the alleys, collecting junk. Christ, it could have been anyone, any white son of a bitch who liked his meat dark. Josie was a beautiful woman, white bastards were always snooping around the Settlement like the whole six blocks was their own private whorehouse. Not even Alvina was safe and she was only twelve years old.
At first he’d had to nurse his beers because he hadn’t brought any money with him, but gradually friends would drop in, Harlan would pick up his tab, or the hotel would hire him to do odd jobs around the building in exchange for room and board. Someone kicked in a wall upstairs, William Henry would fix it. A toilet started leaking, or a shingle blew off the roof, William Henry to the rescue. For the whole month he never ate anything but sausages and mashed potatoes or pickled eggs washed down with beer. He had his morning shave every day across the lobby, as usual, although sometimes it wouldn’t be until noon and only then because Harlan kept that bottle of Kentucky sour mash in his cupboard. Jack Daniel’s at first, but William Henry got him to switch to Jim Beam because the name Jack Daniel’s reminded him of Jackson. That was another thing, her naming him Jackson.
“You name that bastard after my father?” he said to her on one of her many attempts to get him to come home. She’d come down to the hotel with the baby wrapped up in a shawl so no one would see his shame, and Harlan let them have the barbershop to talk in while he invented some errand he had to run uptown.
“I named your son after his grandfather,” she said, a fire in her eye he hadn’t noticed before.
She sat and nursed the child in Andrew Jackson’s barber chair and he perched himself in the other one, staring at them in the mirror, mother and child, unable to avert his eyes or look directly at her. He wanted to believe the baby was his, he could feel himself leaning towards it, but every time he laid eyes on the child sucking at her breast he shook his head. How could it be? How else could it be?
“How you gettin’ by?” he asked her reflection, putting as much meanness in the question as he could muster.
“We gettin’ by,” she said. “Alvina and Benny, they miss you. They keep askin’ when you comin’ home. What am I supposed to tell them?”
“Tell them they want to see me they can come down here. This where I live now.”
“They too young to understand that.”
“Then tell them any damn thing you want,” he said. “Tell them the truth.”
“I do tell them the truth. I tell them that you’re their daddy, and you’re Jackson’s daddy, too, and someday you’ll wake up and come home where you belong.”
William Henry never had nothing but trouble from white people, and now here he was with a white son. That was it in a nutshell. He’d heard tell of a coloured couple in Detroit had a white baby but it turned dark after a while, and by the time it was a year old it was the same colour as its mama, dark dark. William Henry kept his eye on Jackson for the whole month he lived in the British-American, every time Josie brought him down to tempt him, but he never saw any sign that the boy was turning colour. That baby stayed resolutely white. If anything it got whiter. Now Jackson was almost eighteen and he was still white as a Klansman’s bedsheet.
As a child Jackson never fit in. William Henry would watch him trying to play with other kids, coloured kids on the block, and they always kept away from him. They’d be in a circle playing marbles or something, and Jackson would want to join them, and they’d move aside to let him in, but they always moved a little too far, William Henry could see it from the house, how they’d shuffle over without actually letting him in. Jackson felt it, too, he wasn’t no dummy. He’d come back to the house, and the circle would close up again as if he’d never been in it, like water.
“What’s wrong with them?” he’d ask William Henry, tears filling his little eyes. But there wasn’t nothing wrong with them.
When he got older and started going to mixed schools, Jackson would steal coins from William Henry’s pants pockets to give to white kids so they’d let him into their gangs. William Henry caught him at it several times and whupped him pretty good for it, but it cut him to see his wife’s son so desperate to be liked. One day when Jackson was ten or eleven he got invited to a birthday party in another part of town, God only knew how much that cost William Henry. Alvina was supposed to pick him up when it was over, but William Henry had to go get him early for some reason, and when he got to the house and knocked on the front door, the woman who answered it stepped back like she’d been struck. William Henry was used to that, he barely noticed anymore.
“Hello, ma’am. Would you tell Jackson that his daddy come to take him home?”
The woman looked over William Henry’s shoulder, and he knew she was looking for Jackson’s white father sitting in the back seat of a big, shiny car, and he didn’t say nothing but just looked at the woman with that blank expression he’d learned to use, and when she finally caught on she sucked in her breath and her face set and she went and got Jackson and that was the last birthday party he was ever invited to outside the Settlement. So it wasn’t like William
Henry didn’t understand Jackson.
Let him go, thought William Henry. Boy wants to go, let him go.
A month after Jackson was born, Harlan come into the tavern, sat down across from William Henry at this very table and give him a disgusted look.
“What wrong with you?” William Henry asked him.
“What wrong with you, is the question,” Harlan replied.
“You know what’s wrong with me.”
“I been watchin’ you drag yourself around this here hotel for a month now, wonderin’ when you was going to get down off your high horse and go home where you are wanted and needed.”
“Harlan, my wife had a child by another man. A white man. What you think I’m going to do? Get down on my knees and thank her?”
“Did Josie never tell you what happened?”
“No. What happened?”
“I don’t know what happened. But I know what you think happened.”
“I know how people make babies, if that’s what you’re talkin’ about.”
Harlan played with William Henry’s box of matches. He took out a match and snapped it in half, then took out another and snapped that in half. Barbering had given him strong fingers.
“You think Josie been seein’ some other fella. Some white fella,” he said.
William Henry snorted. “That’s how it’s done. You’d know that if you was married.”
Harlan shook his head. “This ain’t no joke, little brother,” he said, still toying with the matchbox. “Didn’t you ever consider that maybe she was forced?”
William Henry narrowed his eyes. “What you mean, forced?”
“I mean maybe she wasn’t seein’ some other man. Maybe some other man jump her. Maybe a car full of other men. It happens, Will, you know that.”