A Bird's Eye

by Cary Fagan

  “Are you dead or what?”

  A girl’s voice. I opened my eyes. And saw a Negro girl looking down at me.

  “What?”

  “I said, are you dead? I can call the undertaker if you are. They got fancy black feathers for the horses to wear.”

  “I don’t think I can get up.”

  “Grab my hand.”

  It hurt in about twelve places as she hauled me up. I bent over, but I didn’t retch. “So what did you do?” she said. “Steal something?”

  “I didn’t do anything.”

  “You’re too scrawny. You ought to carry a blade.”

  “I don’t know who you are. You don’t go to my school. And you talk different.”

  “Because I come from Louisiana. My daddy come up for a railroad job. Only you don’t say railroad here. You say railway, stupidest thing I ever heard. You have awful weather, too. Got any money? We could buy some smokes.”

  “There aren’t any stores open in the middle of the night. And I don’t have any money.”

  “Then what did I bother saving you for?”

  “You didn’t save me. They ran off.”

  “’Cause I peppered their ugly butts with rocks.”

  I was breathing better now and I stood up straighter and looked at her. She was taller than me, gangly, like she hadn’t finished growing into herself. Round-faced and toothy. Not real­ly pretty.

  A wave of nausea came over me. “I think I might throw up after all.”

  “Well, don’t splash on my good shoes. My daddy just brought them for me. They’re from Philadelphia.”

  This was my introduction to Corinne Foster. She was the first coloured person I had ever met, and I could not stop stealing glances at her whenever we passed under a street lamp. We walked down Albany Avenue to Bloor Street and sat on the steps of Trinity United Church and watched a Weston Bakery van go slowly by. She had been in Toronto for six months, brought by her father after her mother’s death in a store robbery so that she could stay with her aunt and uncle while her father was on the trains. Her father worked for Mr. Pullman. People said that Mr. Pullman didn’t hire Negroes who were too light-skinned, he preferred them dark. Her father was dark, but her mother had been very light and probably had some white in her from before the Civil War. All of this she volunteered freely. She expected that when winter came she was going to freeze to death. They went every Sunday to a Negro church and she had her hair done by a lady in a Negro barbershop, but it was nothing like her old home, she said, where it was a whole coloured community, practically a coloured town.

  I didn’t know what civil war she was talking about, nor did I understand half of what came rushing out of Corinne Foster’s mouth. She was a talker, but she seemed satisfied by my listening and not saying much in reply. It is possible that I fell in love with her that night.

  My father had not spoken to his brother for years, or to his sister either. But I knew that my uncle Hayim had kept his promise to Hannah. He had bought for them a small, handsome house on Winchester Street, close to the mansions on Sherbourne. It was like my uncle to choose a street where Jews were not particularly welcome, and to enjoy the discomfited looks of his neighbours when he doffed his hat to greet them in a loud and excessively friendly voice. He was always dressed in the latest style, for he had an English tailor on Bay Street, which marked him as newly rich in a manner that he did not quite recognize.

  The Kleeman factory was at the west end of Adelaide Street. All the metalwork was done there, the casting and stamping, while the celluloid tubes were bought from another factory to be turned on lathes into barrels. Then came the assembly and finishing. While other makers produced pens in all sorts of colours and even patterns, Kleeman pens were only black, which Hayim believed would emphasize their practicality and economy. His office was on the ground floor, and in the first years Hannah had been the bookkeeper, having gone to secretarial school. But as the company prospered, he had insisted that she give up working.

  She hated where they lived. She missed her old friends from the factory, whom Hayim forbade her to see. She often walked the few blocks to Allan Gardens, for she loved the warm, scented air and rare flowers in the Palm House, but she did not feel comfortable among the women and nannies and prettily dressed children. Nor could the beautiful if unfashionably long dresses that Hayim insisted she wear disguise her limp.

  Not that Hannah wasn’t grateful. Gratitude was her stock-in-trade; it was all she had to offer — to people who were kind to her, who overlooked her deformity, who protected her. Most of all, to Hayim. She feared him a little, she did not enjoy his company, but nevertheless she doted on him. And after all, he had no wife yet to look after him. Did he eat sufficiently? Was he working too hard? Could he not put aside the anger he felt about one thing or another?

  She liked me to visit. A year ago I had knocked on the door and a maid had answered. But hearing a boy’s voice, Hannah had come to the door. She felt a terrible guilt about Jacob and so was happy to welcome me into her home. I came every couple of weeks, not for her sake but for my own. She always plied me with food and gave me a present — a new book, the few dollars in her purse, a pair of leather gloves.

  Today she wore a new crepe gown. I tried to guess what it cost. We sat having tea and delicious small cakes that she had sent the maid out for when I arrived. At the window of the front parlour, she looked out to see that dusk was slipping into night. Even to a boy it was obvious how lonely she was and that she was glad for my company, asking me about school and friends and my mother and father, causing me to make up more lies than I could keep track of. She mostly talked about my uncle, who told her about the problems in manufacturing and supply, the difficulty of securing government orders without belonging to the right clubs, the impossibility of joining those clubs. Even so, the business was successful. The Pen That Works — that was what the newspaper advertisements said.

  Aunt Hannah, as she asked me to call her, crossed the room to the phonograph and looked through the new stack that Hayim had brought home for her. She liked to play her new records for me; they were the one luxury that pleased her. She chose Fritz Kreisler playing Brahms’s violin concerto, and as it came on she stood with her eyes closed and I watched how it transformed her, the way music could do that for some people. And right then the front door opened with a bang and she quickly lifted the needle.

  Voices, laughter. “Hannah? Hannah, I want you to meet someone.”

  My aunt was never comfortable with strangers, but she especially hated when her brother brought home guests — business associates or, worse, men he met at one of the restaurants he frequented. I sat rigidly in my chair, for my uncle was not nearly so fond of my visits. Hayim came in with a tall man with orange hair parted in the middle and a slack, rubbery face.

  “Hannah, why are you hiding in the corner? Ah, I see our nephew is also here. This is my good friend Tobias Whitaker. Tobias’s family owns Whitaker’s Stationery, one of the biggest suppliers to businesses in the city. Toby, my sister. And our nephew Benjamin.”

  She looked pained as the man approached. “A great pleasure, Miss Kleeman,” he said, taking her hand.

  “We’re absolutely starving,” said Hayim. “Have Bess get us some supper. We’ll just have a little drink in the meantime.”

  “Of course,” she said. I could see she did not want to walk in front of this man, but she lowered her head and passed by him, excessively conscious of her uneven gait. As she left the room, she heard the men laugh.

  My uncle didn’t have much choice but to offer me something to eat as well, which I would have accepted even if I’d been full, which I wasn’t. In the dining room, he described Mr. Whitaker’s lineage, how he was a third-­generation graduate of St. Michael’s College. Mr. Whitaker had recently returned from Europe. The Depression had shaken most of the Americans out of Paris, he said, and all anyone did was ta
lk about the possibility of war. Hayim exclaimed about the Whitaker family home on Beverley Street. “A Victorian mansion, but completely modernized. You ought to see it, Hannah. This is a log cabin in comparison.”

  “But this is very sweet,” Mr. Whitaker said. “And to tell you the truth, our neighbourhood isn’t what it once was. A nearby home has just been purchased and there is a rumour that it is going to be divided into apartments. I can’t think of anything more grotesque.”

  Hayim said, “Do you know how many pens we shipped last month? Eighteen thousand.”

  Aunt Hannah looked at me and said, “We have Benjamin’s father to thank for that.”

  Hayim didn’t look happy, but he said, “Yes, our brother. I am the first to admit Jacob’s genius. I wanted him to come in with me, but he refused. It was his loss, I’m afraid. But let’s not ruin the evening’s fun. What do you say, Hannah? We could push aside the furniture and you and Toby could dance. He knows all the latest dances. What is that new one, the Lambeth Walk?”

  “You know that I don’t dance,” Hannah said.

  “But it would be my pleasure,” Mr. Whitaker said, and smiled. My aunt looked at me as if to ask me not to desert her. But I knew that I would leave as soon as we got up from the table.

  At this time I was beginning to consider my escape from the family home. I had, I think, about as much sympathy for both my mother and father as an adolescent boy could have. I knew even then that they had never fully embraced the New World, much as they had wanted to escape the Old. Nor had they found a new world in each other. But that did not much mitigate my burning desire to live just about anywhere else. But I had no savings, and while I considered asking my aunt, I had some of my father’s stubborn pride and didn’t want to succeed on my uncle’s money.

  In the meantime, I had to find other ways to escape. Slipping out of the house after dark, I had to squeeze out of my small window, grab onto the brick sill next to my own, place a foot at the top of the window just below, and then shimmy down the shaking rainspout. My hands slipped and I fell the last few feet.

  “Hey,” Corinne said. She could get out of her house before I could and so was always waiting for me.

  “Hey yourself,” I said back. It was hard to see much but her eyes. “What you want to do?”

  “I got a couple of hours before my daddy’s supposed to be home. He’s coming from the Rocky Mountains. We could go to the river, try to find change that fell out of people’s pockets doing the hootchy-kootchy.”

  “We never found anything last time. I got a piece of Black Jack.” I unwrapped it, bit it in two, and gave her the other half.

  She worked it in her mouth. “Hope I don’t break a tooth.”

  “That wouldn’t matter. You got, like, ten extra teeth.” This was my way of hiding the fact that I was always thinking about her face, her mouth, her small round breasts under her shirt.

  “I do not,” she said.

  “And fangs. Like Dracula.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t suck your blood. You’d taste bad.”

  By now we were already walking down Markham Street, past the small dark houses, a cat slinking in a doorway. The two of us could walk for hours. We’d grow tired, but still we’d keep going, along the Humber River on the west or the Don on the east, up to the streetcar barns where we would look through the windows to see the men with their sparking blowtorches doing repairs.

  I said, “Let’s go to your aunt and uncle’s house, Corinne.”

  “Oh, shut up.”

  “Why not? You’ve been to my house.”

  “I haven’t been in your house, have I?”

  I didn’t have a reply to that.

  “You really want to meet my daddy? He won’t like you one bit. “

  “You said he won’t be home for a couple of hours. Anyway, I won’t go in. It’s just to see where you live, that’s all.”

  “Why you so interested? Oh, all right. I don’t mind. At least I won’t have to listen to you go on about it.”

  She started walking quickly down Crawford, and with her long legs it was an effort for me to keep up. I smacked her on the back with the flat of my hand and started running, but she caught up in a minute and then we were running together. The only time we stopped was when a police car came sliding along the street and we ducked behind some trash cans.

  We got down to King Street, passed Dufferin, and then down Cowan Street. From there I could see the tops of some of the higher buildings on the Exhibition grounds. Only when a train rattled by did I realize we were fifty yards or so from the tracks.

  “That’s our place,” she said, pointing to a small bungalow set far back from the street. There was a light on in the porch and I could see a figure sitting there. I slowed down, but Corinne grabbed me by the sleeve and we kept going, right up the walk. He was a small man, shorter than Corinne and much darker-skinned, although otherwise she looked like him. He had close-cropped hair and wore eyeglasses and had on a well-worn corduroy jacket. He had a thick book in his hands, and as he got up he put it on the rail.

  “Your aunt wanted me to go looking for you. But I said there’s no point, I won’t find you. So I’ve been waiting up instead, trying to decide if I’m greatly displeased or extremely displeased by your behaviour.”

  “I’m sorry, Daddy. What are you reading?”

  “You’re changing the subject.”

  “I’m not. You know I like the books you like.”

  “It’s War and Peace. By a Russian. It’s long, but it’s good. Who’s your friend?”

  “His name’s Benjamin.”

  “Do your folks know you’re here, Benjamin?”

  I didn’t see any advantage in lying to him. “No, sir,” I said.

  “I don’t know what this age is coming to, the way children don’t listen to their elders anymore. You two hungry? Auntie baked an apple rhubarb pie.”

  “Yes, Daddy.”

  “Come on inside, then. And don’t wake up your aunt or uncle.”

  Another train went by, making the porch tremble as I went up the stairs behind Corinne. Inside, the house had a very large, bare kitchen, but all the other rooms were small. Her father took a milk bottle out of the very old icebox and cut us generous slices of pie, and while we ate he asked us questions as if he was genuinely curious. The pie was tart and sweet both. It turned Corinne’s mouth red, and mine too, I suppose.

  With so many people needing to rent out rooms, boarders were not easy to find. Nevertheless, my mother turned down a woman just arrived from Port Arthur on the grounds that we already had a woman boarder and they were far more demanding than men. Three weeks went by before a man offered to take it, but my mother said that he was too feeble and that, if he died in bed, who would pay for the funeral?

  At last came a third. His name was Sigismond Eisler. Totally bald but virile-looking and with the bushy eyebrows of a moving-pictures comedian. Full lips, a barrel chest, bowlegged. An unattractive man, but with a certain tenderness in his eyes — this is what Bella saw. His possessions were held in two suitcases tied with rope, which he carried uncomplainingly from the market to the house and up the stairs. He looked into the room for significantly longer than was needed to take it in.

  “I am a good cook,” Bella said.

  “It is reminding me a little of my boyhood room. Yes, I will take it with gratitude.”

  He pressed the back of his hand to his forehead and closed his eyes a moment, as if a terrible image had come to him. She wanted to reach out and touch his hand, but she said, “You can pay rent today?”

  “I have a wife and child.”

  “Here? The room is too small.”

  “In Germany. She refused to leave. We did not have the same political ideas. They will come for me if I stay. I was a coward to leave, perhaps.”

  She had never heard a man say such a thing
about himself. But there is a kind of man who needs to prostrate himself even before strangers, eternally hoping for forgiveness. She watched him take out his shabby wallet and count out the money. She took the bills from his thick fingers and slipped them into the pocket of her apron.

  “Dinner is in an hour,” she said.

  Of course, I did not see all this myself — there is much that I did not see directly. But just as it is possible to guess that a man is thinking of an ace or a heart, or that a woman in the audience wishing to volunteer will be pliant or troublesome, so it is possible to know what is said and done, what is desired and feared.

  I did, however, see my mother ladle the pasta al forno from the ceramic dish onto the new boarder’s plate. Miss Kussman passed it to him, not hiding her resentment at having been displaced one seat at the table. I watched the new boarder take up a forkful and put it experimentally into his mouth. His eyes bulged as he opened his mouth and fanned with his hand.

  “It . . . is . . . hot!”

  “Food should be hot. You like it?”

  “It is very good.”

  My father snorted and, ignoring the knife, tore off the end of the bread. Miss Kussman said, “And what sort of work did you do back in Germany, if I may ask?” She herself worked in the Neilson’s factory and sometimes brought me broken chocolate bars in a paper bag that I now shared with Corinne. She had a prominent Adam’s apple that reminded me of Olive Oyl.

  “I was working in the office of an architect. Making models. Flats for working people. Common spaces. Gardens and meeting rooms. But then there was no work.”

  “And there’s no work here,” my father said.

  “Yes, you are an expert on that,” my mother said.

  Miss Kussman asked, “And what are you doing now?”

  “Oh, anything to keep body and soul together.” He was digging into his food now, hardly able to eat fast enough. “Mr. Kleeman,” he said. “You are not related to the Kleeman Writing Instrument Company? I see their advertisements everywhere. I even have one, you see?”