The Meeting Point (27 page)

But he could think of no place to take her; and now that it was cold weather, it was very uncomfortable in the back of his car, although it was a large black Buick. They had tried the apartment of a lawyer friend of his, but one night, the lawyer
friend came in too soon (Estelle was standing on her virtues that night) and caught them putting on their clothes. She felt humiliated; very compromised. The tension in their affair rose with the inconvenience of being alone when they wanted to be. Once, when lust got the better of them, and made them almost insane with desire and plotting, he took her to the Four Seasons, a motor hotel in the downtown part of the city. But the clerk at the desk assumed the moral and ethical responsibility of the entire city, and refused to accept the man’s cash. “Listen Mack,” the clerk said to Mr. Sam Burrmann, B.A., M.A. LLB (Toronto), “not in here. Take
her
somewhere else. This is a decent establishment.” (But Sam had tried “it” in that decent establishment twice before, with two different blondes.) The clerk had said this to Sam, who did not tell it to Estelle. But she knew anyhow. He went back to his Buick and they drove around the city, building up mileage and courage; and thinking of a place. He was conscious of his pride, and of his position; and in a strange way, was mindful of her pride. She was his woman: he had not yet begun to think of her as his whore. But he wanted her badly; and he ate his pride and burned his oil and gas, and decided on a house on Jarvis Street. In a window, Estelle saw
BED AND BREAKFAST
, written on a dirty piece of cardboard.

“You make me feel like a whore.” She was thinking of the women back home she had seen going into houses like this. The way she had thought herself so much above them; and what she herself called them — bitches! — and now?

“You’re not,
really
. You’re not …”

“That doesn’t mean I don’t feel like one.”

It took the whole twenty-six ounces of Canadian Club whiskey to take the evil taste out of both their mouths. Since
that night, the distaste of the house kept them from wanting each other (although they continued to meet) for almost two weeks.

Tonight, however, she was happy. The simple elegance of this coffee house, with its blue-and-white table cloths, and its ordinary painted-over hard bottom chairs, appealed to her. Back in Barbados, only the poorest of the poor would sit on these chairs; and she herself would not sit on them; but in this coffee house, in this country, they were charming to her. The man she was with had just told her he loved her. He did not want her to go back to Barbados. And she was very happy that he said he wanted her: she was also a trifle embarrassed through conscience, because her own motives for giving him her gift of love, were to put him in a position to be exploited. She must not think of these things, though, she warned herself; because she had given him a gift. If he wanted, or felt he had to give her a gift in return (perhaps assuring himself of another taste of her generosity), then she need not feel badly about his motives, at all. And that was what she decided. And having decided, she could then begin to enjoy the atmosphere of the coffee house. The man said he did not like the atmosphere of this coffee house: the music was too commercial, he said. But he came nevertheless, because it was a place where he could hide. He could bring a woman here, and his morals, or his guilt, or whatever it was that made him feel uneasy with a woman, not his wife, all these little inconveniences of conscience could be lost here, because it was taking place in a coffee house, in the Village, “among artist-types and beatniks,” as he said, more than once. Before Estelle, when he needed love and relaxation from the professional crowd of Malloney’s and the Park Plaza Hotel Roof Bar, he would go alone to the
Twenty-Two (before many advertising men heard about it) or to Seventy-Three Yorkville, where he would sit and sip and dream of getting into bed with the Spanish woman who helped to raise the price, the attendance, and the consumption of expresso coffee, by wearing a pair of panties under a meshed pair of black tights, so suffocatingly tight, that it was uncomfortable for Sam Burrmann to sit quietly. But in the Penny Farthing with Estelle, he was uncomfortable: the customers were mostly young, with beards and long hair, and with a smell of freedom which was really the odour of uncleanliness and laziness.

Her attention was drawn to a big beautiful black man who came in as if he owned the entire street. Estelle was so overpowered by his beauty and his strength which seeped through his expensively tailored suit, that she had to stare. And then a small white man, neat and willowy, prim and feminine, with a beard and a guitar in his hand, said to the black man,
“Hi, baby!”
Estelle had to smile (the man she was with was already becoming jealous of the big black man) and admit that “baby” was a funny way to address this black mountain of a man. But the black man merely said to his friend, “Shit, baby! how you doing?”

“Damn Americans!” her escort said. “Whole place is full of them.” Estelle refused to dispute this judgement. “These coffee houses’re so depressing nowadays,” he went on. “Before, you could come here and relax, meet decent people … but now, well, wherever you go in Yorkville these days, you see a lot o’ Europeans, Italians, Germans, Greeks, Americans …”

The small guitar player was giving them a song, in a foreign language. The man with Estelle had to lean over to be heard. “And you know what I heard the other day? All these
coffee houses are cells, cells for one thing or the other. If it isn’t some kind of nationalism, it is smoking pot. Kids with long hair, kids wearing jeans, kids in bare feet … they’re spoiling everything.”

“You come here often?”

“Well, no … sometimes, after work … to relax.”

“Instead o’ going home, Sam?”

“Well, I don’t mean it that way, though it is … But why are we so serious? Let’s enjoy ourselves, eh? Would you like some more coffee?” A short young woman, dressed in black, wearing a white band in her long black hair, came to serve them. Estelle wondered why she had to wear so much black. Agatha had pointed out to her, as they were driving through the West End, that all the women on that street, young and old, dressed in black, were Italian immigrants. And Estelle had looked at them, and had liked them. Black seemed to go hand in hand with Italian immigrants. But this young thing, serving coffee, didn’t suit black; and black didn’t suit her. Black shoe and black stocking, to boot! Estelle observed.

“That girl’s mother is dead, Sam.”

“What’re you saying?”

“Look at her.”

“How did you know?”

“She is dressed in black, from head to foot.”

And Sam laughed. “You have a weird sense of humour, believe me.” He was still laughing (and he had held out his hand, and rested it on Estelle’s knee, under the table) when a black man holding a white woman round her waist, entered. The man was wearing a very small felt hat. Estelle noticed it was much smaller than his head. His clothes were neat; and he was walking with a subtle kind of bravado. When he took off
his hat, she thought something was wrong with his head. It was shining. His hair was slicked back, straightened and pasted close to his scalp; (Bernice’s hair would have been like that, almost, had she not been interrupted by the footsteps that afternoon. She looked at Sam, and smiled. He was the one who had interrupted them. Only she knew: and Sam!) only the man’s shoes were shinier and blacker. The man left his woman sitting, and came up to Sam, as if he had grown up with him. He slapped Sam on his back.

“Sam, baby!” His arms were open, as if to embrace Sam; and all the time he was grinning. “You old motherfucker, you!” Sam didn’t know what to do. He had hardly looked at the man long enough to recognize him. It was a peculiarity of his, this inability to look into a black man’s eyes.

“I don’t think I know you, sir … ”

“Shit, baby! Jeffrey! Ain’t you remember me, Jeffrey? Me and him and a few other ofay cats who used to gang up on those Jewish rabbits round Spadina in the good old days …” (He was now telling it to Estelle.)

“Oh.” He remembered. He remembered Jeffrey being beaten by the policeman; he remembered Jeffrey’s mother; he remembered fifteen, twenty, thirty years of things he wished he had forgotten. He had refused to think of it because he still carried the guilt of it with him. Apparently, Jeffrey couldn’t (or didn’t) remember the cause of his being sent to jail. “Yes, yes!” But Sam was not very enthusiastic.

“The guys tell me you’s this big cat now in town, baby! Swinging with the cats of the law. Man, you must be wailing in bread. I see you got you a nice chick, here, baby!” He beckoned to his fiancée; she was coming to join them. A few couples close by were finding the conversation very interesting.
But Sam was nervous. “Hey, Sue! come and meet my old crazy side-kick from the old days, baby. This cat is a lawyer; but me and him used to groove back in them days, stirring up a lot o’ shit with the Jews and the Polacks …”

“Look, I’m sorry, sir,” Sam said, rising. “We’re just leaving. I was having some coffee with this lady, a client of mine, since …”

“Crazy, baby! I sure glad as hell to lay my eyes on you, baby. Gimme your card, man. Me and you gotta get together like in the old days. Perhaps I may throw a case or two your way, eh, buddy?”

“I am sorry, sir, but I don’t happen to have a card on me, right at this moment.”

“That ain’t no problem, baby,” Jeffrey said. “Take mine, then.” And he slapped Sam playfully on his arm, and said, “Surprise yuh, ain’t I? Drop by some time, man.” The card was the size of a usual calling card, and all it had on it, printed, was: J
EFFREY’S
9223720.

“Okay, okay,” Sam said. The waitress was coming with the coffee he had ordered; he was trying to hustle Estelle out. “Look, I gotta go, I gotta go. Give me a call — at the office, sometime.”

“Crazy, man!” Even after Sam and Estelle left, Jeffrey was still talking about him to his fiancée. “That cat! That sweet motherfucker been swinging since he was a kid. Only God knows how much coloured babies Sam has in this place. That cat … ”

The afternoon the letter came, Bernice wept. It was the same letter she had written home; and now it was returned to her, stamped: ADDRESSEE UNKNOWN. Everyone in the village
knew Mammy. Bernice gave only one meaning to this strange message, stamped in black, uneven ink (she made a mental note of the colour of the ink!) and bearing the terrible message. “Mammy unknown in Reid’s Village, where Mammy was born and spent most of her sixty-three years?” — except the three years spent in the Canal Zone, in Panama, helping the Americans to build the Canal.

She rushed upstairs to her room, to be alone, to express this tragedy, in tears. She flung open the door, and screamed, “Estelle! oh God, Mammy dead!” And when there was no answer, only the drum beat of the record, stuck in its groove on the player, did she realize that she had seen Estelle leave, earlier. Nobody was home. It was four o’clock. No house was more like a graveyard than this large tomb, this Saturday afternoon, in the middle of spring.

She looked at the envelope again. She saw the handwriting on it; she saw the Canadian postage stamps; she saw the stamp stamped on it, in the Toronto Post Office; the other stamp from the Barbados Post Office when the letter first arrived there; and the series of other stamps made both in Barbados and in Canada, sending the letter on its long last walk back to her. Looking across the street, amongst the colours of spring, she tried to search the curtains at the third floor window, for Brigitte. She could not see her. She did not see her in the yard where the children played. There were no children in the yard. Brigitte had stopped by, late in the morning, to ask her to warn Boysie not to call so often: her policeman friend was becoming suspicious and threatening. And Bernice remembered she had listened, and had promised to tell Dots, but that Brigitte urged her not to. “You not tell Dots. Just Boysie, to warn him.” And she had pinched Bernice, knowingly, and like a
conspirator; and had left. Bernice sat by the window, trying to gather her thoughts, trying to find some logic to contradict this tragedy. But all she could think of was Mammy: in a small house in a village by the sea, and boarded up in many places with pieces of tin-shingles made of large butter pails from Australia. She thought of the sea which had claimed Pappy’s life. She thought of Estelle, and of Marina Boulevard: the waves of leaves, brown leaves, red leaves, brick-painted leaves of spring raged round the front yards of the houses opposite. She could see the leaves taken up by the wind, and sent like sprays all over the yards; and then settling themselves nervously into a heap round the tall scarecrow of the maple tree in front of Brigittes house. This was too much like the storm which claimed Pappy’s life, so she stopped thinking about the leaves, and thought of someone to call. Dots isn’t home, there isn’t no damn sense in calling that husband o’ hers, ’cause he stupid as hell … Estelle outta the house as usual … now, what about Agaffa? Agaffa, hell! … and Henry? … Henry just as useless as Boysie. There was no one to call. “Mammy dead, far away in Barbados, and there isn’t one blasted living soul in the whole o’ Toronto Canada, that I could call on for help and assistance?”

She went to the chesterfield for her bible; and she knelt in front of it. Tears made her eyes red as those of a man on a diet of rum; her hands were shaking so much that she found it difficult to turn the pages, and find the portion of scripture she felt Mammy’s death deserved. Her fingers moved over the silken pages, rustling them like the wind outside was wrestling with the leaves. She found the section. She read it aloud, her hands pressed together in the attitude of prayer.
“The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green
pastures; he leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul …
” She made the sign of the cross, although her present denomination told her not to do this. But she felt she had to do this extreme thing to suit an extreme tragedy. Through her tears, through the filmy vision of her tears, the page looked like a large newspaper page at the bottom of a pool on which the wind was striking. But although she could not see each word, she read the lines because it was a portion of scripture she had memorized from her Sunday school days. “ … 
thou anointest my head with oil; and my cup runneth over. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life …
” Her sorrow was running over: there was nothing she could do to contain it. Her former strength of mind now began to crack. She cried and she sang
The Gloria
; and it was this that Mrs. Burrmann heard, that sent her rushing up the stairs to find out “what the hell’s going on in this house, Leach?”