After the news and the first television movie, after five drinks, he still faced a long night. So he got up from his favourite leather chair that grew higher and longer when he sat upon it at a certain angle, and embarked on his nightly roaming through the house. He touched the backs of chairs and ran his calloused hands over the crocheted antimacassars on the heavy upholstered furniture. Grease was left on them. He went to the third floor in the voiceless house, to the room where he’d been sleeping since she died, and took out the ten suits he owned. He had bought the material cheap in the garment district on Spadina Avenue and had given it to a West Indian tailor. The suits were all of wool, made in the same style, and with waistcoats. He never wore nine of them; and the one that touched his back was worn only once. But every Sunday morning, in the spring and in the summer, he put them on the pink plastic clotheslines in his backyard to get the sun and the air. Mothballs were in all the pockets of each suit. And in the lapel of the black serge suit was the white carnation, dried and dead now, which he had worn to his wife’s funeral.
He sat on the bed, with five suits on each side, and ran his thick birthmarked palms delicately over the rich material. He smiled as he discovered the tailor’s bill in the breast pocket of one of them, the subway transfer in the waistcoat of another; and these two mementos did not bring back any clues to a life that seemed to have ended long ago. He replaced the bill and the transfer.
Even when she was alive he had delighted in these expeditions. His delight was no less this Friday evening. He used to put his father’s suits on the line to sun when he was a boy. His father had two suits, a black one for funerals and church, a dark brown one for weddings and “services of songs” and dances, which were called balls in those days.
“Any cockfight,” he said, as if he were talking to his wife, and as he had joked with her each Sunday morning before she left for church as he prepared his suits for airing, “any cockfight, and I can’t be caught with my pants down! I prepared for any cockfight. Funeral or wedding.”
He didn’t know that the funeral would be his wife’s.
Even now he wondered whether he hadn’t, by his harmless words, brought on her death. She had taken ill on a Wednesday, called the doctor on a Friday, and the following Thursday she was dead. It was cancer. She had borne it silently for one year before she confessed her pains to the doctor. Cancer.
But he must not think of her long, silent suffering and swift departure now. The house was still in mourning.
At the bottom of the clothes closet from which he had taken the ten suits was a line of shoes, black and brown, stiff from lack of wearing, and shining bright from the weekly polishing he gave them. They were perforated at the instep, and they all had rubber heels. He hated noise. These he took out, all twelve pairs, and as he had seen his father do every Sunday morning, he polished them with Nugget, black and brown, and spat on them twenty-four times to improve their shine.
He’s in the bedroom where she died. He brushes the dust from her large black Bible. He rests his hand on its cover, like a man swearing to tell the truth, and for the first time he has a strong urge to open the Bible. The pages, trimmed in gold, fall apart, dividing the book almost in half, and he sees the lines: The sleep of the labouring man is sweet, whether he eat little or much: but the abundance of the rich will not suffer him to sleep. Was she trying to tell him something? It could not have been an accident that his eyes would fall upon this passage. The pages had fallen open on their own when he held the bible. It was as if the bible had reorganized its weight to be balanced in two almost equal halves.
He began to remember how her voice wheezed when she read. A soft, almost bronchial whispering. And then he noticed the smell of her bathwater, Bournes Bay Rum. It was the smell of death too, that same smell he had noticed in the funeral parlour. And although his friends from the city parks department had sent fresh flowers and wreaths that took up one entire pew, her smell, body and bathwater, was stronger.
What is the time now? The bottle is less than half empty. He looks out onto his former landlady’s house. He knows her profession because he knows her, and they say good morning to each other every morning. But the men and women and children in all the other houses have remained strangers. He does not see them except on weekends. His hours are not theirs. And no one except his former landlady has ever come to ask how he is now that he’s alone. Perhaps they do not even know he’s alone. Perhaps they do not even know she’s died. At home in Barbados the coffin and the funeral service would be in the front room, and the whole village would know and would mourn. But here in Toronto, her body was placed in the balmed safekeeping of a funeral home. Out of sight, out of memory. Could he die in this house and nobody would know until the gas company came to read the meter?
The street is quiet and ordinary. There’s only the normal activity of people passing. No one pauses, no one’s aware of him, no one looks up and sees anything different. Their lives have not changed. A woman passes with a plastic bag of groceries. A foreign car stops, turns off its lights, and the driver locks the door and disappears in the larger darkness. That’s the man who wears a beard and walks with books in both hands. The woman with the plastic bag enters the house beside his through a heavy black door that has brass rectangles on it. Perhaps she’s a lawyer.
Three Indians pass. One of them drops the bag from which he’s eating. He casts his eyes right and left, above and behind, then digs his left hand deep into the seat of his trousers, shivers, and walks on. He laughs. Perhaps his companions have seen him in the shadows at the second-floor curtain. They’re all wearing cloth wrapped around their heads, and the street light turns the cloth into shimmering silver.
He had never seen them on this street before. He wondered where they were born. He was glad they did not live on the street.
How much more could he bear?
He does not watch much television, even though he turns it on every night, for there’s too much crime and murder coming into his living room. Last week a nine-year-old girl was missing from the park; and after searching for her for two days, they found her cold in an unused refrigerator, strangled and raped and buckled in two, like a flying fish, to suit the size of her attacker’s whim. The refrigerator was still plugged into the wall. Every week in the Toronto Star you read that a man killed a man or a woman, and sometimes two or three; and on television you see thousands killed or starving to death. In Africa, which he doesn’t know and doesn’t care to see but which he hears a lot about, the television shows him images of ribs and dried flesh, and flies on black faces. And before the story ends—the suffering on the faces or the images on the screen—he shuts it out and turns it off.
But there was one night when he could have borne more. That was the night, many years ago, which he relives even now. The smell of meat in old oil had disappeared. The house was still. Rose and pine, the smells his former landlady favoured and kept in a green bottle, drifted from the first floor up to him on the third. The two bottles of smells for the house had a wick that looked like a grey tongue. He liked this mixture of smells more that night than in the ten years he had lived in her house. That was the night he bought this very house in which he now stands looking out at his unknown neighbours.
Quietly as the creaking linoleum allowed, he had walked down from his flat to use the bathroom. It was beside the communal kitchen. For ten years he had used caution and was always conscious of the smells and the noise when he was inside that cold room. He always ran the water at full blast to stifle the explosion and the smell. Down the steps of green indoor-outdoor carpeting, then over the thick broadloom leading him to the first floor, where he stood noiselessly inside the screen door of glass and chicken wire. He stared at it through the peephole. His house. It appeared circular, almost round within the restriction of the peephole. The house was like a womb. His eyes were watery from the strain of looking. He could hardly breathe. The landlady’s television started to play “O Canada.” He waited until the national a
nthem was over, until the martial music became a hum and then silence. And in that cold white silence he took a last look at his house. The broadloom changed back into the indoor-outdoor carpeting, he was back again in the area of his flat, linoleum creaking on the uneven stairs. He could hear each step. He did not know until he had reached his flat that he had walked so heavily. He was still wearing his construction boots. And before he closed the door, he laughed aloud. Three doors somewhere in the rooming house opened and he could hear the inquisitive steps into the hallway, then the slamming of the doors in disgust. He stared at his wife’s worried eyes, and he heard his own laughter and then hers, rejoicing at his success.
He believed she was a religious woman. He believed she was a weak woman. He watched her practise her religion day and night with a Christian silence, as if she was doing it to give him a whipping. He remained at home, shining shoes and airing his suits, when she took her Sunday-morning journeys to the Shaw Street Baptist Church. She wore brown against her brown skin, with the only relief being the glossy silver of her hair. And a string of pearls. And he followed her out of the corner of his eye, out of the right side of the second-floor window, as she set out for the ten blocks to Bloor and Shaw streets.
In his imagination he would follow her down the incline, at which point she always had to slacken her pace because, as she complained after each Sunday, she had “symptoms and pains.” It was unbearable to hear her speak this way, as it was when he watched her try to turn the pages of her bible. Every afternoon, when other women would read the Star, she read her bible. And sometimes she read aloud, as if she was telling him a bedtime story. “The sleep of the labouring man is sweet . . .”
And he would be on the couch dozing in front of the television, the half-empty glass of Canadian Club at an angle ready to crash on the coffee table, and he would be saved each time by the scoring of a goal and the explosion of noise in the Gardens, and would wake to hear “ . . . will not suffer him to sleep.”
“You really miss her, don’t ya?” His former landlady was sitting on his verandah. It was a summer afternoon. He was watering his roses. The aluminum chair in which she sat was his wife’s favourite.
He was pouring too much water over the chrysanthemums. The water was breaking off their stalks.
“You really miss her.”
He washed the mould from his hands and joined her.
“How’s your nephew?”
“This place’s too big. You should move to a smaller place. Even a room. Or back in with me! What you say to that? My nephew’s moved out. Sammy. My first sister’s first boy. Had to ask him to leave. But he’s not far from me. Just over there at Golden Acres on Bathurst. He likes it there.” She paused at the end of each piece of information she gave him, as if she wanted him to fill in the rest for himself. He did not know whether she would go on. “That’s the best place for someone with his condition. Cancer, ya know. I can’t be bothered looking after him. Too much time and too much work. I have my church, as you know. Keeps me busy. I just had to get him in a nice home. Now he’s his own man. But I make him visit me every Saturday. My church keeps me busy all Sunday. This cancer is such a bad thing. A person needs attention all the time . . .”
He was thinking of the broken stems. When this woman left, he would prop them up with sticks. She got up, pulled out the part of her dress that was stuck in the crease of her behind, raised her dress high enough for him to see her legs, and prepared to leave. He saw the thick blue veins, like wandering worms in the fat parts inside her knees. “I’ll get my nephew to come over and keep you company. He’s coming Sunday this time. On Sunday I have to run down to the hospital to visit a church member.”
As night closed in and he was into the last fifth of the bottle of rye, feeling the full weight of loneliness which he experienced every night in the summer, at sunset, the same heaviness that he knew so many years ago in Barbados, as if the word “dusk” meant that dark scales or ashes from a nearby fire were falling all around him, he began to do what he always did at this time of night, whether in Toronto or in Barbados. He began to touch things: objects that made him remember brighter times.
He brought his old copies of Popular Mechanics from the basement and put them into boxes. Next, he packed his winter boots and the two pairs of old workboots. He threw them back onto the concrete floor of the basement, and with a cigarette dangling at the corner of his mouth, and rye and ginger in hand, he went upstairs. The natural light of day and the light in the house was now mixed. At this time of day, when he was a small boy, his mother had always asked him to shut the windows in her bedroom, to keep out the mosquitoes. And always, wherever he was, he would enter his bedroom at this time of day, not knowing why, until this Saturday evening when he stood in the bedroom where she died.
The white crocheted bedspread, now turning grey, was as she had left it. Some necklaces of beads, large as red grapes, were on the frame of the mirror on her bureau. Her copies of The Light of Life, Living a Christian Life, and The Watchtower were piled neatly, month by month, on the floor beside the bed. Her embroidery—palm trees growing out of red earth, and two pieces of needlepoint with “God Bless This House” in shaky script—were on the bureau top. Hanging in the clothes cupboard were all her dresses, untouched for eleven months from the day she had ironed them. They now looked like carcasses of slaughtered, undernourished animals. In circular wooden frames, there were other pieces of embroidery, mere outlines, drawn in pencil on cloth. Her winter boots with the fur trimming and woollen balls at the ends of the laces stood upright like the two ushers at the funeral parlour. And the monthly Baptist Messenger, which she stacked in a neat pile after reading twice.
He was too close to her while he sat on her bed. But he was drawn to her, in a headiness of exciting adventure, as a climber ignores the perils of height for the sake of exploration.
In his hands is the shoebox. In it is her jewellery. When will he hear from the saleswoman? Bright gold-coloured brooches, clusters of luscious fruits and bouquets of flowers. They do not remind him of his gardens in the city parks. Some are silver-painted stars of glittering waterfalls, and buttons and pins given to her for her attendance at church with relentless frequency and for her Christian devotion. He puts his hand deeper into the box and fingers her jewellery. When he was a child, at the beach, he used to dig into the soft, wet sand until he reached the water below. Into his grasp came a strand of pearls. He had bought them for her. Was it a birthday or an anniversary? She wore them every Sunday over her brown skin. The skin of the pearls was peeling now. He should have buried her in this necklace.
The long slithering necklace ran through his fingers, like soft sand, bead after peeled bead, and he measured the months of loneliness with each bead.
Her bureau drawers were filled with her underclothes. Some he had never seen before. Her pink corset, its metal stays covered in silk corrugated cloth, was like a rack of ribs in his hands. He threw it back into the drawer, slammed the door, and left.
When he sat in his chair with the white embroidered headrest, a rye in his hand, the television took over his senses and he was soon in a deep sleep.
It was a beautiful morning when he drew the window curtains apart. He was in the first-floor living room. He had slept in his work uniform again. The sun came in like a bullet. His spirits were high. He felt vigorous and he added up the things he wanted to do. It was as if he was among his flower beds in the east end park. If only they would approve his transfer soon . . .
Sibelius Park was ablaze with colour and already filled with children. A green Frisbee sailed from one end of his window and disappeared out the other, leaving a rainbow of excitement and children’s laughter. His former landlady faced him, coming up the walk. An old man was scraping behind her, his shoes sounding like iron on the cement. He remembered the old man’s cancer. He must be walking in pain. He looked terminal inside his oversized suit. But he was smiling.
“Here’s Sammy!”
Her ne
phew’s face was red. Did they leave him out in the sun on the verandah over at Golden Acres and forget to take him in?
“Sammy, tell Mr. Trotman about Golden Acres. I won’t be gone a minute . . .” She was already at the end of the walk. “He caught me unawares. I thought he was coming tomorrow . . .”
But he was glad for the company.
Sammy was a silent man. Whenever he had seen him passing and had waved at him, he was smiling and dressed in a three-piece suit which was always too big for him. Did the cancer cause the padding in the shoulders to droop?
Sometimes the pain in his body came over his smiles, like bacteria on a leaf. It seemed to stab him now when he moved his body to take the three steps to reach the door.
They sat without talking, looking out at the park. A pink Frisbee joined the green one. And a dog ran and jumped after it.
“Ya want one of these?” Sammy asked. He turned his head to see Sammy take a short flat brown bottle from inside his breast pocket, unscrew it, and put it to his lips. His swallow-pipe jumped like a piston, up and down. “Jeez!” He passed the back of his hand lightly across his lips. He pressed his lips tightly, and shook his head and squeezed his eyes shut. When he opened them, they had taken on a look of pain, rebuke, and fear. “Jeez!” he said. His face was washed in a smile.
He left Sammy smiling and went into the kitchen. He returned with glasses, ice, a bottle of ginger ale, and a bottle of Canadian Club. A larger smile broke out, like the sun, on Sammy’s face. The children in the park were screaming for joy at the elusive Frisbees.
“Jeez!” he said again.
They drank the first one in silence.
“The bitch,” Sammy said. He took another drink. And with each sip, he did the same thing with his lip, his eyes, and his head. The silence returned between them, strong as an old bond. He could see long afternoons of loneliness and few words and deep memories in Sammy’s watery eyes.
The Austin Clarke Library Page 64