Authors: Austin Clarke
On these mornings, when he was alone, he would read in his study, or listen to very progressive jazz which his wife called “vulgar and certainly not the kind of music a man in your position should waste time listening to, why don’t you ever try to improve your mind, you’re so damn vulgar for a lawyer!” But jazz and not Beethoven was what Mr. Burrmann grew up with, on Palmerston Boulevard. He used to spend all the time he could, and his money too, listening to black musicians from America, who came to play at the Silver Dollar, and at an inconspicuous establishment, euphemistically named The TNT. With the jazz and black women and whiskey and the crap games, he had had his share of Negro culture. He had thrown dice with the Harlem-like men, and have even consciously imitated their mannerisms, and a few of their diversions, such as smoking marijuana, because he had found his own orthodox life dull and boring. But he had emerged “clean” from all this, because he had his university degree and was ambitious; and he wanted to be a lawyer. One aspect of his Spadina days never left him: it was the complete satisfaction he had known, while in the thighs of a large vulgar-laughing black woman named A-Train, who roared in and out of the El Mocombo Tavern, like an express train, singing rhythm-and-blues. It was
A-Train who had done that
thing
to him, with such vulgarity and completeness, that it never left his mind or body. And he would think of it, as he was thinking about it this morning, and cold shivers would run down his spine like an ecstatic paralysis. When she was finished with him, she held him like a baby in her arms (she was two hundred pounds and had muscles like Mohammad Ali, the heavyweight champion of the world) and put her face close to his, and shouted in his ears, “Sammy baby, you ain’t nothing but a child, a little teeny child.” And she dropped him out of her arms, and he fell on the broken, many-tongued springs of the rented bed. And he started to cry. “Get to hell out, Sammy. And don’t you ever come back till you’s a
man
!”
Throughout his married life, the terror of responsibility in bed, plus the fact that he was conscious he was marrying Rachel Gladys Heinne, heiress to a million dollars in slum-house real estate (he had lived in one of those very slum houses owned by Miss Heinne’s father, who came to Canada broke, in 1909, from Poland), had instilled a certain resentment for the woman who became his wife; and it accounted (so his psychiatrist told him) for a certain drying up of his energies and his love, whenever he made love to her. He always thought he was going to have a child whenever he made love to his wife; and he was terrified that he would have to marry her:
although at the time, he was already married to her
. His hate for A-Train and the truth she had done to him and had told him; and also Mrs. Burrmann’s attitude to sex, did nothing to help untangle the mesh of emotions and deep fears which took him in their arms whenever he wanted a woman. After some time, Mrs. Burrmann herself went to a fashionable psychiatrist in the Bloor Street Colonnade; and she sent Sammy to one in the
Medical Arts Building, several blocks away, on the same street. (He was thinking this morning, that he never did satisfy his own curiosity about this action of his wife’s: and he, a man, had allowed her to tell him what to do, and which expert to consult about
his
problems. He resented her more for that: she was being superior again; laughing at him for making the problems and then helping him to solve them.) After the first meeting, his psychiatrist told him, “Sammy, leave, man!” and go home and try “it” in as many attitudes and states of mind until Mrs. Burrmann understood “her natural role.” It was all very confusing, and not a little ridiculous. But Mr. Burrmann never tried “it.”
It
had already become repulsive to him. And he never did find out what her psychiatrist told her.
The complete destruction of pride brought upon his sensibilities by A-Train, in those loud, whorling-whirlpool Spadina days, would sometimes cause him to search for his lost manhood, among the European coffee shops on Bloor Street West; and later, in Yorkville Village. In his law firm where he was a brilliant corporation lawyer (this was another variation of his earlier ambition to be the best Jewish criminal lawyer in the Upper Canada Law Society’s history, which happened midway through the University of Toronto Law School, because he had succeeded in putting Jeffrey and Jeffrey’s burden out of his mind; and he had decided he wanted nothing to do with civil rights and people who have those problems: he wanted a fresh, clean un-sordid law practice) he kept to himself, whenever that was possible. But he was always searching: in the evenings he would visit the coffee houses in the Village, where the candlelight was only bright enough for him to read
Playboy
and
Foreign Affairs
; and weak enough for his austere business suit with subtle pinstripe to appear like badly cut, off-the-rack
Hipster’s
threads
. His search would take him into daydreams over the red-and-white checkered tablecloths, between the soot and the flickering hopes of the candles and the “free” women, young and maidened, upright as virgins in common-law packages: and always he would think of bizarre experiences with these women, especially one who was tall and willowy and daring in her walk, and shabby and thin, even for a model, and who wore her hair long and stringy and uncombed like the tail of a horse. There must be a variation; there must be love; there must be women to
try IT in as many attitudes and states of mind until they understood their natural role
: but all the women he had loved, before and after his marriage, always left — they left town; or left life; or left fornication; or left love. But they left; they all left; but before leaving him they told him they had to leave “in order to be fair, because I want you to know before I do anything, since it is the least bit of decency I can do.” Many times, in coffee houses, the Penny Farthing, the Act One Scene One, the Half Beat, he tried “it” within the free regions of his mind,
in as many attitudes and states of mind
as time would allow, as it took the horse-hair woman to drink her expresso coffee: but the thought of his wife, in her attitudes, intervened. His wife’s attitudes to
it
, when all the things essential to the after-cleanliness of the performance, were brought into the bedroom; and were placed on the marble-topped dressing table. There were clean, fresh, fleshy towels: one for him, inscribed
HIS;
and one for her, significantly christened,
HERS
, and “by-God, one of these days, or nights, I’m gonna use the
wrong
towel,
HERS
! and then I’ll see if I contract syphilis, or some damn incurable disease … ”; and scented by Chanel. The vaseline was there too; not in a cheap jar as bought from Woolworth’s or Kresge’s; and marked
VASELINE
,
which was really what it was, but in an apothecary’s jar which Mrs. Burrmann had bought at an art shop on Cumberland Street. The jar was inscribed OINTMENT, written on skin-colour Band-Aid, in red ink! The most recent passions of sex to come to his mind, were twice within the last three months, when on her insistence, they did “it” twice — on her birthday; and on their tenth wedding anniversary. Mrs. Burrmann was brought up in an orthodox Jewish home with Christian dispositions, and was taught that it was more proper to use phrases instead of the medical terms, which were synonymous with those phrases. She would wear the thin red silk nightgown, bought from Macy’s in New York; and silk negligées which did not hide her body, and which were not meant to. And this bothered Mr. Burrmann: this temptation. On those nights of sex, she would come into her bedroom which had a large circular double bed, and which was separated from the other room by a short hallway and a door. Rachel Gladys Heinne-Burrmann (this is how her name appeared on her personal stationery of blue paper; but he called her, when he called her, Glad) …
Glad would lie there, God, on her back, like a cloud fallen to the ground
(he was talking to the woman of his dreams, as she drank her expresso, but she could not hear him, because he did not intend it to be that kind of conversation. He was talking to her spirit, which he knew could hear his words; he was complaining to her, like a child searching faces of adult unconcern for a welcomed ear) …
and she would lie there, still as the dead body of Mary, not Jesus’s mother, but Mary who went to call the cattle home and call the cattle home across the Sands of Dee, and whose body was found later, in the moss and sunset beds of floating death, in the River Dee; waiting waiting and preparing as if for a goddamn operation in a hospital, permitting
the ether of desire to work itself through her body, and for the Benedictine and Brandy to take the feel of his hands and body, from her body; and with the Vaseline, oh God, no, the OINTMENT, the towels, the wash basin and ewer which she picked up at a bargain in Yorkville Village on Yorkville Street at a shop which sold toilet bowls and other ointmentations.… Christ! that’s a good word! must remember that one — ointmentations for bowls and bowels … Sam you’re going crazy as hell, loony nutty stark-lark-goddamn crazy! … and Glad’ll bring in glasses, two glasses, crystal, the only two of a wedding present; and the tall decanter of B and B. And you, like a goddamn fool, would come in, see her, your wife, and your goddamn head’ll start to spin just like the time when A-Train did that awful thing to you, you goddamn little teeny boy
(what A-Train did to Sammy Burrmann, was so tantalizingly ticklishly spine-tingling-gee-gee-gigglish, that he never once clothed the thought of it in words, when he thought of it)
you weren’t even a man enough to admit to yourself that you wanted to go to bed with Bernice, your maid.… Goddamn, Sam, you’re slipping, baby! going to bed, and you can’t even call it by its real name, you goddamn … “Miss? Miss? Would you like to work for me? I’m a lawyer, you know; and I can give you a job in my law firm. Bay Street, right in the financial, fine-arsial centre of Toronto.”
He was feeling tired; and he got up, stretched and rubbed his eyes, and continued to read. For the first time, he saw the words on page 130. “What?” he said, almost shouting. He rubbed his eyes and read the passage aloud:
“While announcing that he was freeing man’s spiritual personality, he degraded man’s civil personality to the blackest slavery.”
He could not believe it; he read it, studied it, read it over again. “Blackest slavery? Could Djilas be thinking, even remotely, of Bernice? Or Estelle?” And further down, he read: “ …
Stendhal
observed how young men and young women carried on conversations only about ‘the pastor.’ ”…
So many things were troubling him, in his searches; so many things. He got up from his desk, put on some progressive jazz, and went into the kitchen to pour himself a double bourbon, straight, and without ice cubes.…
The snow is falling again. Estelle looks out and sees the skies polka-dotted white on white. She is happy. “Canada is a nice place. I like it here.” When Bernice returns she must ask her again about becoming a landed immigrant:
immigrant reçu
. She sits at Bernice’s window, and dreams of home: wonder what Mammy is doing now, at this minute? Wonder if the pains in her head are better? Lonnie, poor stupid Lonnie was vexed as hell when I came instead of him. Wonder what time it is in Barbados, right now? God, I bet nobody in Barbados ever saw snow falling so pretty!
Those footsteps that stopped outside the door the afternoon she was “processing” Bernice’s hair, were like a thirst that had to be quenched, a tantalizing of the mind that had to be satisfied. But she was frightened: she was faced now with something she had never known in her life, back in Barbados.
Estelle was a woman, upright morally, in the terms of that loose licentiousness of life in a slum area. She was ambitious. Ambitious with men, the way Bernice was ambitious with her bank account at the Royal Bank of Canada. She was sorry she didn’t go to church, even after the quarrel. But she decided to remain —
home
. She had actually thought out the word, home. Home to Estelle was any place where she couldn’t see Mammy; where she couldn’t see the poverty of her village and the villagers; where she didn’t have to go behind the house (within the tall rotting paling) to go to the outdoor closet, in
rain, in wind and in the sun. Home was
Away
. Away from that home. And to make her escape from poverty and the fear of poverty, finally final, she had put Mammy in the Poor House, in the care of the parish. This made her nervous and guilty every time Bernice inquired of Mammy. She had to get rid of Mammy, which she did, ten months before she left. She worked it out carefully, in her mind, this terrible fraud she had to play upon Bernice. It was a fraud; and it was not a fraud. Mammy was losing her sight and her health; Mammy never really possessed the sight nor the right of the pen, and she had to write and read all the letters from Bernice. She spent all the money sent, on Mammy. This was her great honesty. But now that Mammy was in the Poor House, Bernice would probably find out, some day. This fear never permitted Estelle to relax.
Mammy didn’t care to hear about Canada, and the problems Bernice wrote about. Mammy only insisted on signing her own name at the bottom of each letter, herself. That was the personal freedom she insisted upon; and she refused to sign, until Estelle had read to her what she had told Estelle to write to Bernice, her girl child, “up there in that terrible place, by herself.”
She was thinking of the footsteps again; imagining things, dreams about the owner of the footsteps:
he is downstairs, having breakfast with his wife and children; and he’s just taken a strip of bacon which Bernice has fried before going to church
(she dressed herself in Bernice’s uniform and body; and herself took over serving breakfast); she sees dangers in those thoughts, so she stops thinking them. She thinks of the time Agatha took her to the Towne Tavern to hear Joe Williams sing and roar and curse in the blues:
and there’s this old black woman in the
washroom for women. But what the hell is she doing in there? Does she have to wash their hands? wipe them? kiss their backsides after they use the toilet? …
Through the window, she sees Brigitte opening her window, holding more than half of her body through it; and she debates whether to call her, but it “don’t look good, decent to see a person shouting through a window.” Brigitte waves a hand; Estelle looks and a man appears; and Brigitte closes the window, and the curtains. Blasted Brigitte, blast her! Estelle says; blast Agatha, blast Bernice, blast
everybody
! “I should tidy up this damn apartment … I wish, I could wash some panties … I should comb my hair … I should wash some nightgowns … I would like to cook a Sunday meal for Bernice … Christ, I can’t do nothing, nothing nothing in this blasted fancy apartment!” There is nothing in the apartment except a clothes closet, a chesterfield, a coffee table, two metal chairs, a matching metal table, a dressing table and a bathroom. Estelle turns on the radio: church! “Church, church, church, hell!” She turns off the radio, goes into the bathroom, closes the door, and shouts,
“Jesus Christ!”
four times. But not even this lamentation can be heard: her loneliness is soundproof. She opens the bathroom door, comes to the chesterfield (she is still in her slip) and she wishes aloud, that she was dead, “I could kill myself now, I could kill myself”; and she falls on the chesterfield as if she was really dead, wishing she were dead.