“Theresa Wawati,” he said, extending his hand. “Please be seated,” he said, motioning to the chair in front of his desk. “I’m pleased to meet you. Would you care for a cup of coffee?”
Theresa nodded that she would. Whatever it was that he was going to tell her, she wished that he would get on with it.
“Is your last name an Indian name?” he asked.
“Yes,” Theresa said.
The dean liked her avid and ingratiating smile, but he could see that she was nervous. “May I ask what it means?”
“It means ‘northern lights’ in Indian.”
“That is quite lovely. I’ve often felt that the Indian language must be a beautiful language, though I certainly know nothing of it — beyond the fact that many of our place names, like Chicoutimi or Mistassini, come from Indian. Do you speak your language?”
“Yes,” Theresa said. She was getting somewhat impa-tient with the small talk and did not see where it was going to lead, and she was too shy to try to direct it on another tack.
“You’re a very well-groomed and attractive young woman,” the dean said.
Theresa wondered if he expected something else when an Indian visited.
Dean de Gaspé brought the coffee-serving tray to Theresa. She took a cup. Though the aroma attracted her, she worried that the caffeine in her system would make her even more nervous than she already was.
Were it not for her inevitable politeness and tolerance, her ability to listen to someone talk at length, Theresa would have blurted out that she was curious to know how she had done on the entrance examination.
“Our faculty is a well-respected one, as you know,” Dean de Gaspé began. “I don’t think I could be accused of conceit if I rated it as the top faculty in North America for French civil law. So while we have many things of which we can boast, we have some problems as well, as all law faculties do. One of our major problems at the moment is that we do not have significant participation by minorities. Do you personally know any Indian lawyers?”
“Two in Ottawa,” Theresa said.
“Well, that’s two more than I know,” the dean said, “and those two must constitute a high percentage of all the native lawyers in Canada. Here at the Université de Montréal, we’d like to help rectify that.”
Theresa wondered whether this meant that she would be in on the rectification, or was the dean trying to tell her that she did not make it in spite of all the efforts of the Faculté to give opportunities to Indians? The coffee was indeed making her more nervous.
The dean continued. “Two years ago at the Faculté, we instituted a policy of giving special consideration to natives and to other minorities. By the way, would you like another cup of coffee?”
Theresa was now nervous because of the caffeine, but in her nervousness, she said “yes.”
“The program has been working fairly well,” Dean de Gaspé said, as he finished pouring her coffee. “That is, with respect to other minorities, such as blacks and certain classes of recent immigrants. But it hasn’t really worked with natives for the simple fact that no native has applied in the last two years. That is why I was so glad to see your application.”
A white woman in this position would have said something to hurry the dean along in some way, but Theresa just sat there, waiting patiently for him to come to the point.
“Naturally my interest was piqued when I was told that you were to be taking the test. When your test was finished, I asked to have it examined immediately. The way our program works for minority admissions is that the test is only one of several factors that is considered — this is true for the other students as well — but minorities receive an actual numerical increment on their score which is designed to help them in competition with the other students.”
Theresa still had no intimation of what her own results were.
“I asked you to come here because there is something I would like to tell you.”
Theresa was by now wide-eyed with anticipation. She had a big smile — but a smile of apprehension.
The dean was smiling as he spoke, “You performed quite well on the entrance test. You passed it and, furthermore, you passed it without the bonus we accord to minorities. I hope you’ll enjoy your three years at the Faculté de Droit.”
Chapter Fourteen
I
“Jim, did Theresa call?” Shane asked as he came into their apartment.
Jim called out from the kitchen. “No, was she supposed to?”
“She said she’d call sometime after one in the afternoon and now it’s after three.”
“Maybe she forgot.”
“She doesn’t forget things like that.”
Shane called Theresa’s apartment, and Victoria answered. Theresa hadn’t come by or called in the afternoon.
Shane began pacing back and forth across the living room floor. Jim noticed his nervousness and tried to change the subject. “That was quite something that Theresa got accepted into law school.”
“It sure was,” Shane answered. “She was really excited. I’ve never seen her so happy. Do you know what she said to me? She said, ‘At least one thing finally went right in my life.’”
Jim shook his head in a combination of agreement and amazement. “Yes, one thing finally did go right. That girl had more hard luck by the time she was seven than you and I will have in our lifetimes.”
“Probably,” Shane agreed.
“She’s wrong about getting admitted to law school being the only thing that has gone right in her life though,” Jim said.
“Oh?”
“There’s you. If a woman — or anyone — has just one person on the whole earth who loves him as much as you love Theresa, he or she has life licked. Nobody has a right to hope for anything more.”
“Thanks, Jim.”
Shane continued to pace the living room despite Jim’s best efforts to assuage his nervousness.
“You know, two hours is not a helluva lot of time,” Jim said. “She forgot or she got busy.”
“She doesn’t really forget things like that,” Shane said, repeating himself from before.
“Two hours late doesn’t mean that she’s been hit by a car crossing the street,” said Jim, immediately thinking that perhaps he could have used a better example to reassure his friend.
Shane dialed Theresa’s apartment again, despite the fact that it was only thirty-five minutes since he last called. Victoria said Theresa hadn’t called.
Shane put some water on the stove to boil for tea. And while he did so, he paced the living-room floor.
Before he had the tea ready, he got on the telephone. He called Mrs. MacNeil; he called the Faculté de Droit; he called Indian Affairs in Montreal where she knew some people. He called Victoria back, asked if Theresa had, by chance, come in or called, and then he asked if Victoria knew of anyone Theresa knew in Montreal. She did not.
“Where does she go if she’s downtown?” Jim asked.
“She goes to one or the other of the English-language bookstores once in a while.”
They both had the same thought; should Shane or should he not walk the downtown area and see if they could find her — either in the bookstores or in some of the other places she occasionally visited?
Shane’s thoughts started getting a little more disjointed. “Maybe she went for a walk in Old Montreal. She always liked it when we took walks down there.”
Jim jumped up to grab the tea kettle off the stove as it was starting to whistle. “Yeah, but in the middle of the afternoon, by herself?”
Shane thought for a while and sipped his tea. He could, by no manner of reasoning, figure out where Theresa might be.
“Maybe somebody died,” Jim said, “At Barrière Lake or somewhere, and she just jumped on a bus.”
“If she had taken a bus, she would have called me at the first stop,” Shane said.
Shane thought for a while. Then he said, “There’s a woman at the Indian Affairs office in Montreal named Aga
tha. Theresa used to have lunch with her once in a while.”
“Call her,” said Jim, then he waited expectantly while Shane got various operators and receptionists and finally got through to Agatha.
Jim watched Shane’s face. He spoke to the woman for a moment and was polite and then very hopeful. It appeared that Agatha knew where Theresa was. Jim sat up attentively. And then he heard his friend blurt out, “She what!”, say a few words of thanks and put down the telephone receiver gently.
“Well?” Jim said.
Shane poured a cup of tea and sat back on the living room sofa. The look on his face was a vacant one. “She called Agatha up around noon. She told her about having passed the entrance examination to the University of Montreal law school because Agatha hadn’t heard about it before then. She said that she and Agatha should go out for a beer to celebrate. Agatha said that she had something to do after work that was very important and that she could not go along with Theresa.”
“Then what happened?” Jim asked.
“Agatha doesn’t really know. She told Theresa she couldn’t go, and Theresa just said that it was too bad she couldn’t and that was that.”
“You think Theresa might have gone out by herself?” Jim asked.
“I’m wondering about that.”
“Any idea where?”
Shane hesitated a moment before speaking. “Agatha said that Theresa invited her to a place on Crescent Street where she usually goes.”
“What do you mean by ‘where she usually goes?’”
“Well, Agatha said that Theresa goes there from time to time to have a beer and a sandwich.”
“Anything wrong with that?” Jim asked.
“Geez!” Shane exclaimed, with some impatience, to his friend. “How do you think she lost her two kids? Alcohol. How do you think her father happened to beat her mother and made it so Theresa and her brother and sister had to be given up for adoption? Alcohol. There’s no mystery there. Theresa should not drink alcohol any more than her father should have. One lousy beer, one lousy beer can start her drinking again. ‘Where she usually goes.’ I didn’t know about this. It’s just a bad, bad situation waiting to happen.”
Shane left the apartment and headed downtown in the direction of Crescent Street.
The barmaid was attracted to him; he could tell that. What on other occasions would have been fairly agreeable flattery was now only an annoyance, and he pressed on.
“Did you by chance see an Indian girl…”
“Theresa,” the barmaid said.
Shane was surprised that she knew Theresa’s name.
“She comes in once in a while for a sandwich and a couple of beers.”
Shane shuddered. “Was she in today?”
“She left an hour ago.”
“Did she drink anything?” Shane asked, not really wanting to hear the answer.
“Oh, yeah. She had a sandwich and then a couple of beers, and then later she had a few more. She met a couple of guys here. Say, is she a friend of yours or something? Your sister?”
“Yeah,” Shane said. “Where did they go?”
“Well,” said the barmaid, “they played pool here for a while, and Theresa looked like she was having a good time. They were buying her beer. Then as the afternoon wore on, the three of them said that they were hungry, and that they ought to find some Chinese food. So she left with the two of them, and they said they were going to have something to eat at a Chinese restaurant.”
“Do you know which one?” Shane asked.
“No.”
“Jim, can you come downtown?” Shane asked his friend over the telephone.
“Sure,” Jim said, and he knew how worried his friend was.
Shane gave him the address of a restaurant just off Crescent Street.
II
“So, that’s the story,” Shane said, after he and Jim had ordered a coffee in the restaurant on Sainte-Catherine.
“Is that bad?” Jim asked.
“It’s very bad,” Shane said. “One beer leads to two leads to three, and then who knows what can happen,” he said worriedly.
“Did the woman in the bar tell you what the two men looked like?”
“She said they were French, both with mustaches and about five feet, eight inches tall.”
“That sounds like every second man in the city.”
“That is what I thought,” said Shane.
They both sat in silence for a while, drinking their coffee.
“How about the Chinese restaurant?” asked Jim hopefully.
“Do you know how many of them there are in Montreal?” Shane said.
“Well,” Jim said, “why not start with the ones in the downtown area? If they want to go to a Chinese restaurant, they aren’t going to go all the way out to Snowdon.”
“You’re probably right,” Shane said. Why don’t you go south of Sainte-Catherine? I’ll go north and we’ll both head east, and in a couple of hours take the bus back to the restaurant here.”
Shane had taken out the telephone directory and quickly listed all the Chinese restaurants north of Sainte-Catherine. He started off on de Maisonneuve, where most of them were located, and occasionally went north or south of the street to find those that were off the main avenue.
The Chinese restaurants began to look all the same to him. The decor of some was plainer than the decor of others, another difference was the degree to which the people in charge spoke English. “Indian woman” didn’t register with some of them, and when they seemed to understand the phrase, Shane wondered whether they did not understand it to mean Indian from India.
Longing to catch sight of Theresa, no matter what the circumstances, he did not find her in any of the restaurants. He tried to determine in his own mind what he would do if he found her in one of the Chinese restaurants. Would he become very angry at the men, or at Theresa, or both? He knew he would not. He would be so happy at seeing Theresa that he would take her home to warmth and safety. He would give thanks that she was safe, and he would accept the situation. It was the Indian way.
But he did not find Theresa, and again he thought of all the things that could have happened to her. The fact that she had left the bar with the two men was not good. Could they have hurt her? Even if they had had supper with her at a Chinese restaurant and gone away on their own, Theresa did not belong outside of her apartment when she had been drinking. Anything could befall her.
On the east part of Montreal, well outside of the business district, Shane took a bus and rode it back to the centre for his rendezvous with Jim.
Jim was not at the restaurant when he arrived. Shane ordered a coffee, though he knew it to be the wrong thing for his nervous stomach. Now that he thought of it, the search and the worry were starting to affect him physically. His face, which some had said did not smile enough, was now screwed up into the most worrisome frown, the facial muscles tightening so much that he now had a headache. What had started as a nervous stomach earlier in the afternoon was now becoming something intolerable.
He looked around the restaurant many times for Jim, but he did not see him. He looked out the window to see if his friend was coming up the street or stepping off the bus. Finally, to see if he could calm himself down, he went to the pay telephone in the entry. He called Victoria, Mrs. MacNeil, and his own apartment (to see if by chance someone would answer), and even tried, rather unreasonably, the law school and Agatha at Indian Affairs. No one had heard from Theresa.
He went to the booth, sat down, and accepted when the waitress offered another cup of coffee.
When in the hell was Jim going to get back? he asked himself. Maybe Jim had some sort of lead that would have taken him off in another direction. It was true that they had no way to contact each other, save for meeting again in the restaurant. He could just visualize having to leave the restaurant and look for Jim. He didn’t like the idea at all.
Just as Shane was about to leave the restaurant, he saw Jim coming through the door.
He sat up in anticipation.
“Did you find her?” Shane asked.
“Yes,” Jim said.
Shane’s spirits soared.” Where?”
“A Chinese restaurant about six blocks down on Boulevard René-Lévesque.”
“You don’t look very happy about it,” Shane observed.
“I missed her by an hour,” Jim said dejectedly. “She was with the two men and they left.”
“Was she drinking?”
“Yes.”
They were both silent for a while and avoided looking at each other.
Finally Jim spoke, “What do you want me to do, Shane?”
“I don’t know,” he said as he gave out a deep sigh. “I don’t know. Maybe they went from the restaurant to a bar.”
“There are lots of bars in downtown Montreal,” Jim pointed out.
“I know. But it’s either that or they took her some place and did something to her.”
“Don’t get upset if we don’t know anything yet,” Jim urged his friend. “We’ve got nothing else to do that will help, so why don’t we both walk the streets on the chance we’ll see her. You go in one direction and I’ll go in the other. We can ask people we see if they’ve seen her. There aren’t that many Indian women in Montreal.”
“That might be the best thing,” Shane said. “But first I’m going to call the hospital emergency rooms and the police. It will at least ease my mind. I’ll see you back in the apartment later on.”
III
Shane walked the streets. He felt very lonely. He imagined his life without Theresa, and he could not do so. He checked in various bars and with some people on the street, and no one had seen a young Indian woman. He was sorry that he had not asked Jim to come with him; his friend’s presence would have eased the loneliness considerably.
Up and down the streets he walked until he was almost in a daze. Scores of thoughts raced through his mind, from the various bad things that could have befallen Theresa to his own mistake in not seeing that they had left Montreal and settled either near Moose Factory or near Barrière Lake. Theresa was obviously vulnerable in an urban environment. He kept blaming himself. He thought about Theresa and the many fine times they had shared together. He thought about how much he loved her. The most mundane experiences from the past, shared with her, now became rich, warm memories. What he wouldn’t give to again be able to go and with her get yellow birch for snowshoes and have her make lunch. She enjoyed that much more than going to Place des Arts. He remembered the first time he saw her. It was at the Indian Friendship Centre. He noticed her in a crowd of other Indians. It was her striking smile that made her stand out from the others.
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