The Austin Clarke Library

by Austin Clarke

  “I’m fine.”

  She could not remember if she had asked her mother to come over. She could not remember when it was that she had made the suggestion, if in fact she had.

  She went into the bedroom and took the plastic vial from the medicine cupboard. She did not have to look at the writing on the bottle. And she did not have to spend any time selecting this bottle from all the others there: Aspirin, vitamins, and pills prescribed months ago for other medical ailments, which she never completed taking according to the doctor’s orders.

  She took a few, put them into her mouth, and took a sip of her brandy. She passed a brush through her hair. And she examined her face in the small looking-glass in the bathroom. She cleansed her face with Noxzema cream, applied makeup, and even brushed one of the four colours from the Cover Girl case across her eyelids.

  It was past midnight. She’d made her face pretty. She’d made her appearance appealing. And she did this even though it was only her mother coming over to see how she is. And she knew that her mother would be gone in fifteen minutes, for it is so late; and there is really no need to fix herself to meet her mother. She is her mother. And mothers understand that love and appreciation are not measured in this kind of facial preparation.

  She raised her skirt, hooked her fingers into the elastic at her waist and lowered her pantyhose. She chose a fresh pair of panties. The pills started to make her feel relaxed. She will sleep tonight. The pills and her martinis. And she will usher her mother out, nicely, after a few minutes. Before she put her panties on, she took her silk dressing gown from the nail behind the door of her bedroom. It was rich in colour, a pattern of dragons and beasts that could be from the sea or the vast land of China. It was warm on her soft beautiful body, no longer old and tired as it had been a few minutes ago when she rose from the couch. She drew the skincoloured silk underwear over her legs, and she felt a slight irritation. A piece of paper. And she pulled them down, and a page from her personalized stationery, folded into the size of a large postage stamp, fell out.

  She unfolded it, was passing her eyes over the uneven letters, in capitals, the uneven pencil strokes telling her, We are not coming back coz you send us away, when the doorbell rang. She jumped. She wondered who would call at this hour. She wondered if it was her husband. She wondered if it was the man, her husband’s friend. She wondered if it was her children. She had forgotten she had spoken with her mother ten minutes ago.

  She crept to the door, looking through the hole, and saw the disproportioned face of the woman standing on the other side. She looked old, and ugly from the magnification, and frightening. But it was the eyes, her mother’s eyes, that told her she was safe. She was safe again, safe always when she was with her mother. She was safe in all those years of her bad marriage whenever her mother called, or came over and sat with her, holding her face in her lap, and sometimes, her mother would have her lean her head against her shoulder and pass her hand over her forehead, as if she knew she had a headache.

  The note was still in her hand when she opened the door, taking the chain in her hand, pulling back the bolt, unlocking the deadbolt.

  “What have you got there, dear?”

  She showed it to her. “My dear! Leah wrote this?”

  She did not answer. Her body was weak, too weak for the exertion of words and explanation. And water had already come to her eyes.

  “The little . . .”

  Her mother did not complete her sentiment. There was no need to.

  “Where’re you going this hour?”

  She had noticed how properly her daughter was dressed, hair in place, every strand of her dark brown hair; and the makeup and eye shadow; and she mistook the silk housecoat for a cocktail dress.

  “You young people wear such crazy styles, child, I thought you were on your way out! What would make Leah write a thing like this?”

  “You want a drink, Mom? I only got cognac.”

  “Your father would think I was out to meet a man, at my age!” And she laughed her full-throated laugh. And her daughter laughed too. And was happy for the duration of that laughter.

  “Oh, Mom!” she said. “Oh, Mom!”

  And then tears engulfed her, and washed over her, and gave her the feeling of holiness that she had known in her childhood years of accepting the ritual of being a young Christian-minded child. She knew that powerful feeling that swept over her when she attended Mass, like the warm water of the sea when she and her mother went on their holidays. And she could feel the spirit she knew was inside her body when she knelt and said her personal prayers, after the priest had given the Benediction.

  “Oh, Mom!”

  “What’re you doing to yourself, eh, child?”

  “Oh, Mom!” She reached for the snifter.

  “Why don’t you put an end to this, dear?”

  “Oh, Mom!” she said in the whisper she’d used when she said she intended to enter the nunnery. “Have I disappointed you, Mom?”

  “You are my daughter,” she said. And drew her body closer, and rested her daughter’s head on her shoulder. “You smell good. What is it?”

  “I’m using Chanel No. 5 now, Mom.”

  “That’s a good scent.”

  “Oh, Mom!”

  “Now, first thing in the morning,” her mother began, passing her hand with the three gold rings on the wedding finger over her daughter’s forehead, and then along her neck, “first thing in the morning, you and me, we’re going to see somebody for you to talk to.” And she could smell the scent, and the shampoo her daughter had used. And she could feel the muscle on the left side of her neck. And she could feel the softness of the silk of her housecoat.

  The time passed slowly. Her mother sat silently and paid no attention to the movie on television. Soon there was snow on the screen. All she could hear was the taking in and letting out of breath from her daughter’s warm body and the sudden, short, startled moving of the body. Once, instead of a shudder, there was a sigh. She went back over the years of struggle with the six children she’d borne the man she loved, and still loved; how she’d cut and contrived and got them all through high school, and all but one in college and university; attending graduations and birthday parties, and weddings and christenings, and hockey and basketball practice.

  And you were always my favourite, out of all my children; you were always my star, and I can still remember the nights I stayed up with you, seeing you through measles, mumps, cutting your teeth, toothache, earache, everything, until you met that man you married and threw away your life, you the star, my favourite out of all the children I carried in my womb.

  And time passed without her notice, for she did not know the body was no longer so warm, and she thought of raising the thermometer . . . these bungalows where the workmen worked so fast and didn’t know one thing about insulation.

  Time, passing without sound. And there is no longer the spasm that tells of life, and there is no longer the soft whisper of sleep.

  It is quiet. And this quiet is felt not in the motionless sleeping body she is holding, not from anything inside this house, but through the sound of the leaves and a branch rubbing against the house. And it becomes cold. Her own body is cold and she draws her daughter closer still to her body.

  In all the time, and with all these children, all of them out of my womb, you, you, Claudette, were always my star, and my joy. Out of all of them, I loved you the most. All these years, all these years.

  But this time, it is different. The weight is lighter, but the burden is heavier. Her right shoulder is numb, bearing this sleep that is like a solution. First thing in the morning, I will take you to somebody to talk to you.

  It is still. It has been like this for a while now, and still she continues to pass her hand with her wedding rings on it over and over her daughter’s forehead that smells so seductively of Chanel. And her hand, like her shoulder, loses its life and feel, the circulation gone out of it, until she opens her eyes. And looks. And sees the beaut
iful tranquil face. “Sleep. Sleep, my darling.”

  Her face is soft and relaxed. There is a smile across her lips. Her lips, the smear of the lipstick. The mascara. Her face is soft and relaxed; and the beauty that defines it is young and innocent. “Sleep.”

  ON ONE LEG

  Alexander came into the beverage room like a soldier. Like a general in full dress. With his chest full and broad with the ribbons and medals of his fifty years of experience and battles. Alexander’s battles were fought on the battle-scarred field of everyday life. He walked with a heavy step. And as he walked, you knew he was a man of some substance. He looked so. Perhaps it was the experience that decorated his face with lines and age. This same experience had ruffled his hair with the fingers of its tragedies. And it had marked his face in circles and crow’s feet, like the boulders crawling at the bottom of a mighty long and slow river would have marked the river.

  When he sat down, his body from his waist up to his neck was as stiff as a wooden leg. His head would lean forward, always his head, as if he regarded any aspect of the conversation of his drinking friends to be so important. In the men’s beverage room of the Selby Hotel, where he drank every afternoon straight from work with a ritualistic regularity, his head would follow the meandering slurring vocabulary of his friends, like a child’s pencil following the outlines of a picture-book drawing.

  All the men in the Selby liked Alexander. He was like a general to all of them. They thought he was a bit aloof, but they knew that he liked them too. He carried in his heart a feeling for them that was equalled only by the love and affection which soldiers who have survived wars and close calls have known. The men in the beverage room were like soldiers to Alexander.

  He was always anxious to get there. And when he sat down, it seemed as if he had prepared his system and his appetite the whole day, from nine until five in the afternoon, just for these few hours of being together among men.

  “I’ve been with men,” he told his tired, complaining, callous-handed wife one night as he entered the mothballed house after an evening of drinking beer that stretched out too long, long as the tales of his battles at work, and in the mine in northern Ontario where he had worked for some time. But this did not appease her. She did not know anything about men, she said.

  “They was men,” he insisted.

  He would talk to them as men talked to other men. He would talk about his job, and he would dress his job in important phrases and give tragedy, if not drama, to the sorting of letters, which bored him eight hours a day in the main post office downtown, but which he would never admit to his drinking companions. As far as they were concerned, it was a job, like tactical manoeuvres. As far as he was concerned, he was like a general putting little flags of many different colours on a very complicated map, and directing from this apparently simple movement of flags and hands a theatre of combat whose proportions were great enough to involve the lives of many thousands, of many millions of people: the entire population of Toronto.

  “You have to observe,” he was telling his friends one afternoon. “You should see me in that occupation. There’s one thing about handling the nation’s mails . . .” And he would sip a bit of his beer and allow them to grasp the full meaning of his last words. “You have to be a man of a certain level of intelligence and education to work in this job I have.” And he would again pause and permit them time to raise their glasses to their heads, and he would not continue until each man had swallowed, along with his drink, all that he had said up till then. “Now, I’m a man who didn’t go to university. But I have seen college kids come to work there in the summer, in the post office, and this job that I do, it gives them a hell of a lotta trouble just to learn the fundamentals.”

  All the men would breathe easier and they would look important, as if their jobs were shining in their faces, because none of them had gone to university either; because many of them had not even finished high school. But each one of them could tell a similar story of a university student to whom they had taught a summer job.

  “It could be a serious thing. Imagine. The slightest mistake, the slightest miscalculation, and a letter could go to the wrong person. And people stealing so much nowadays! They could even open a letter and take out the money, if it had any, ’cause people nowadays, particularly the young ones, the ones you see in Yorkville with long hair, hippies—you understand what I’m talking about . . .”

  The men would all nod their heads. They understood. They understood because they had all felt this way about the young men with long hair walking about Toronto “like living deads,” as Alexander called them.

  “I would take on the youngest o’ them right now,” he said on another afternoon, “and I lay a sawbuck on it that he couldn’t throw me!”

  The men nodded and cheered with their eyes. Alexander was talking like a real, honest, hard-working man. “Not one o’ them! If I had a son still living, who’d be twenty this year—ten years he died—but if he himself was living today, he couldn’t throw me! And I am his father. I am a man now, going into my—” But he thought better of the idea and did not tell them how old he was. “A man my age is no pup,” he said with a grin.

  The men grinned too. They nodded their heads faster and more vigorously to show him, like a kind of illustration of sympathy, that they too were old men, but strength and vigour and marrow hadn’t gone out of their bodies, their spirits, or their bones.

  “Yeah!” one of them, Joe, said a bit too loud, for they were sitting at a round table, close together as poker players. “Yeah, Lex! Men!”

  He was the only one who dared to call Alexander “Lex.” And he too fell silent and allowed Alexander to fill up the beverage room with the real meaning of sweat and sinews and muscles and hard-nailed boots and potato chips, chomped like pieces of dried bramble.

  Alexander liked these beer-drinking gatherings. Whatever problem he might have had at work would be set aside, just as he always pushed the loaded ashtray of spit-stained cigars and plain-tipped cigarettes from in front of his seat, and in his easy and unstudied movement made it seem as if the ashtray were the last fistful of letters placed correctly into the pigeonhole at the post office.

  He had therefore successfully pigeonholed one branch of his slowly moving life, and had skipped enthusiastically into the turbulence of this artery which bubbled in the beverage room of the Selby Hotel. He would rub his hands together like two slabs of board covered with sandpaper, slap them firmly but not loudly, and not in any real rhythm of jubilation, but as if to say, “Good! Time for a good, cold beer.”

  He came into the beverage room this Friday afternoon and brushed aside Joe’s ashtray that was in front of his usual seat, although nobody had ever decided upon any order of seating. He slapped his callouses and said, “One here, Bill!” One was his favourite drink. Beer. And Bill was the waiter. It was not his real name, but they had all christened him Bill. It saved them the complication and the mincing of tongue and beer and words and enunciation to pronounce Sudzynowski, which Bill told them in his halting English was the name his Polish godmother had given him, back in the days across the Atlantic Ocean when he was a baby.

  “Fairy godmother!” Alexander jeered with his mouth full of broth and beer and smoke. “Eh? Eh? Eh? Fairy godmother!” He screamed with laughter, the beer dripping down his mouth. Sudzynowski began to teach them how to pronounce his name correctly, for he preferred to be called by it. But they laughed and he decided to forget it.

  “Ahh, what the hell. We’ll call you Bill,” Alexander said. The others nodded in agreement. “’Smore friendly. What you say, Bill? What you say, fellas? You see, we’re a friendly people, eh? Eh?”

  Sudzynowski nodded his head and shrugged his shoulders and went away saying something in Polish. It was not very friendly.

  “Another one here, Bill,” Alexander said five minutes later, when the waiter was within hearing distance. “Bag o’ chips while you’re at it. Worked like a slave today, fellas. All day. I want
to tell you fellas something, something I never told you before in all the months we been joking and drinking together in this place. Pack o’ Exports! A’s! Worked like a slave today, and all the time I watching some young fellas sneaking off to the can to get a rest and a smoke. There I was with not a man, not none o’ them young fellas man enough to match me, to stand up to me. Those bastards with long hair, they won’t take a bath; got the whole goddamn post office smelling like a urinal in the train station, I swear to God! If my boy was still living, and he ever showed me his kisser with that kind o’ hairdo, I smack him one!” Bill, the rechristened waiter, was approaching with the beer and cigarettes. “Eh? Eh? Eh? What you say, Bill? You like hippies? You’re a Polack hippie, ain’t ya? Eh?”

  Bill smiled, and inside his smile he wished them dead. He placed the beer courteously on the shining black tabletop, set Alexander’s chips and cigarettes before him, smiled again, waited for the ten-cent tip he always got from Alexander—nothing more, nothing less, regardless of the amount of beer he drank—and then left, cursing Alexander and all the men at the table, in his mind, in his own language.

  “Any o’ you fellas ever worked in a mine? I mean a mine. Underground. You go down on that lift five o’clock every morning to work your shift, your lunch pail in your hand, your heart in your goddamn mouth, though you can’t show it to the other fellas, and you know, as your buddies know, that one o’ these days none o’ you might see the light o’ day again when that shift ends. Never again. That’s what I call work. Well, I was a miner once. Twenty years of it. After the war. Worked in the McIntyre. Timmins. Best goddamn gold mine in the world one time. That’s my opinion. Best goddamn high-grade miner you see sitting right in front of you. Worked like a bitch in those days. Made money too. Good money. Spent every goddamn penny on women, whisky, and poker. But I had me a ball! I mean a mine! McIntyre. In Timmins. Wasn’ a woman in town who escaped my wrath!”