Authors: Austin Clarke
“Goddamn, you’s paying your dues now, baby.”
“… and Dots, trying hard not to expose all her fronts in front o’ the man, and as the man push this summons in Dots’ face, be-Christ, Dots start one big worthless bawling. A summons, Henry! They send me a summons, man.
Mr. Boysie Cumberbatch versus Nells Used Car Lot, Without Prejudice
. God blind them in hell! … it say here, I is the defendant, gorblummuh, and old Nells is the plaintives.… But you know what this
versus
mean, though?”
“It means you’s against the Man, baby!” There wasn’t any sympathy in Henry’s voice: there was only derision. “You’re learning now how to meet that Man, baby!” He was becoming more proficient in the dialect of his adoption. “And when you get that son-of-a-bitch, I want you to kick in his balls for me.”
“Henry? Henry? Man, I can’t make head nor tail outta what you telling me, man. But listen! I broke. I was taking money offa Dots’ bank account to spend ’pon Brigitte, and Dots was taking off money too, at the same time. Now, all the damn cheques bouncing ’bout this place, and Dots mad as hell, man!” He went on to tell Henry the money was spent at the Cellar Jazz Club and the Riverboat where Brigitte liked to go, because good folk singers performed there; and at the Pilot Tavern, where she was very impressed by the many artists and artist-types who drank beer there. In the midst of all this, Henry started laughing. Boysie started to laugh too, to ease the tension. “But this ain’t no damn laughing matter,” he went on to say, still laughing. “Not at all, because three days ago, Dots went down in Simpson’s and write out a big cheque for a new dress, and that cheque bounced too. And when she figured out
that she had enough money in the bank the day before, to cover the cheque, then the blasted war was declared. Number one, is the cheque. Number two, is that I get in at six this morning, from …”
“Seeing Bridgey?”
“You damn right, baby!” Boysie said, and sniggered.
“Goddamn!” Henry screamed, applauding Boysie. And then he said, “But that’s your cross, old man.”
“The bailiff-man, the policeman that Brigitte have, the cheque, be-Christ, and now, the mottor car, too?”
“Goddamn,” Henry said. For a while, no one spoke. “But Boysie Cumberbatch,” Henry said later, “you know what you’re looking for?”
“What I looking for? Man, that is a blasted queer question to ask a man who has lost mottor car, outside-woman, and gorblummuh! who stand close to losing a wife, too! all in one morning.”
“Who are you, Boysie? What you looking for, Boysie?”
“Well, now that you ask me that, let me put it to you this way, then, Henry.” After considering for some time. “I is a man who don’t have no big lot o’ formalized learning nor education and them sort o’ things, like Agaffa. I is one man who came to this country through the back door, as I tell you. Now, you know, you could bear me out in this, that I been seeing hell to lay my hands ’pon a job, ’cause I isn’t a idle man. Gorblummuh! sweat have poured offa my back like rainwater, pulling hand-cart and working in the canefield in Barbados, so work don’t scare me. But I been seeing them civil service people, the Imperial Oil people, Shell Oil, paint factory after paint factory, mottor car factory, be-Jesus Christ, Henry, the whole bunch o’ them bitches. And you think they would give
me a job? I can’t say, really and truly,
ergo
and
quod erat demonstrandum
, that I get any lot o’ money outta this country, Canada. So I would have to conclude, in answer to your question, Henry, that I is a man who, therefore, only want a piece o’ woman regular, a piece o’ change in my pockets, and gorblummuh! a woman who could support me, and a piece o’ automobile to take me and transport me going and coming from that piece o’ woman and that piece o’ change.”
“Goddamn.”
“You understand now, what I wants outta this life?”
“Goddamn!” he repeated, and then hung up, with the promise to listen for Boysie, later. Henry went back to his day-dreaming. He had reached a stage in life, at which it was easier to lie in bed all day, and dream; a stage at which he was becoming so weak from the exhaustion of thinking, that he could not see much difference between the day and the night: both were nightmares. He was experiencing something like a suspension of time; and he would spend the days, and the nights too (when he wasn’t out with Agatha) waiting; waiting as if he was waiting for somebody or some event, like an enemy, or a detective (he had not forgotten the night on Marina Boulevard when he struck that policeman) or a bailiff — who came often, and wasn’t let in. In these moods, he would think of Agatha. Agatha, in some way, put him into these moods. Sometimes, before she arrived, he would pull himself out of these apathies, and prepare himself for the long walk through the university grounds, through Queen’s Park, Victoria College grounds, Charles Street and then to the Pilot, to spend the night drinking; or it would be the Paramount (with, or without — recently without — Agatha). He was thinking of his life now; and he asked himself the same questions he had
just asked Boysie: “Henry, who are you? What are you?” He looked round the untidy room, at the three large photographs of Agatha, each inscribed,
Forever
; and he told himself, aloud, so that he could hear his own answer, “You ain’t no goddamn celebrity, baby! You ain’t no Sammy, Davis, and you sure ain’t no goddamn Harry Belafonte, neither; and you ain’t no goddamn heavyweight.…” The phone rang. It was Boysie.
“If Dots call,” he said, “tell her I gone down by Jees-and-Ages, playing some dominoes, hear? But I really going up by Brigitte — just in case.”
For a while Henry just listened. He despised him for doing this; but it was a strange ambivalent hostility. “Look, Boysie,” he said. “What you think of Bernice? What you think about me and Bernice getting together?”
“Bernice?”
“I am having second thoughts ’bout Bernice, man. She is my people.”
“And what about Agaffa?” Boysie asked.
“Never mind.” But the doubts had already set in, to eat away at his decision to spend his life (if it came to that, voluntarily, or by force of circumstance) with Agatha. Recently, comparing Bernice with Agatha, he was unable to decide on one of them; he was unable to break off one relationship and embark on the other.
Why can’t there be some nice goddamn black chicks in this town? Goddamn! Man, I know I don’t, and can’t love Bernice; and I know I can’t ever love Agatha, because I don’t have that pain in my heart for either Agatha or Bernice. It is only sympathy, baby, sympathy. Not the kind o’ pain that love is, baby. Because, pain is love. And love is pain. And I don’t have to be no goddamn postgraduate at no goddamn university, to know pain from love, and love from pain, and when love is pain and
pain is love, goddamn!
“And that motherfucker, Agatha, always telling me, ‘I love you, Henry, God, how I love you.…’ ”
Somebody was pounding at his room door. The aggressiveness in the knocking pushed away the suspension of time. He cursed the landlady, who he thought it was (“Goddamn rent again, baby!”) — and who it was. She handed him a letter, sent SPECIAL DELIVERY. When he took it, he remembered the summons Boysie had received earlier today. It was time for Agatha to come. But he was still going to read her letter, which called him,
My dear Henry, I am sorry indeed …
He skipped that page, and began again at the fifth page, the final page, mid-way in which she was saying that
although I am guilty of having fooled you into believing this could work out; and having fooled myself into feeling so, too, through rationalizing my guilt feelings, I must tell you the truth now. A friend of mine in social work at the university with me, has helped me to work out my problem. I shall not see you again. It is bad for me. But I shall always love you. And I hope that you will not hate me, but love me, even though I have done this cruel thing to you. But you were always the stronger vessel, and I, the weaker. Forever, Agatha. Goodbye, Henry
.
For some time lying there, facing the ceiling, his hands under his head, and knitted together, he pretended he didn’t give a damn: after all Agatha was just another rich broad looking for kicks; just another Forest Hill kid, rich and young and bored; or a Rosedale kid, just like those goddamn weird kids up in the village. “Shit, baby, you ain’t never going to make this cat weep, and break up, oh no, baby!” But he had to look at her four photographs, and at the face which was really a beautiful face; and at the boast she had written on the face of each photograph, each one taken in a different season of year
and love:
Forever
. He looked at the clock ticking like a bomb, and it showed him the time of day, and the time of happier days when Agatha would be sitting on the dirty bed in that very room, right here, look man! right here where I’m sitting now! and would be drinking tea or coffee or wine from his chipped tea-cups; or sitting combing the evidence (of having lied to him in his bed) out of her long brown hair; and suddenly, he wished and willed her present, but all he got was her perfume, the perfume of her perfume, the perfume of her body, the perfume of her body after sex … and the things that came to his mind (as her body came to his senses) were little things, the happy things, the joyful things, such as the night when they walked through Queen’s Park when the snow hid the ground for seven inches; and they held hands, he an old man, sedate and a bit embarrassed to be seen so gay and happy, holding hands and playing in the snow; and she, young, flighty and flirty, gay and giggling, deep as the snow, in love with him. Then she said, picking a line from somewhere, “Bet people’ll think they’ve been hippos! What would you do if you saw two hippos?” Before he could say anything sensible (if indeed he had anything sensible in mind to say: not having been exposed to hippos before — only hippies) she threw a snowball right into his face, and turned him into a checkerboard. And the two of them stood like gigantic icicles in the middle of the park bound by snow, kissing. He tried to put this out of his mind, by going to his drawer to search for the leaflet which he had received a long time ago, from the Canadian Anti-Apartheid Association. He had thrown it into a drawer, or somewhere, because he was happy then, and he had his woman beside him. But now, he was searching for it. He remembered vaguely, that it asked him to march. March with us on … a certain date! He
couldn’t remember the date: perhaps the day of Mars and March had passed. But when he pulled out the first envelope, it contained the remnants of a red rose she had stolen from a garden in residential Lowther Avenue, last summer. (“With this rose, I thee dub, my lover, forever,” she had said.) He was remembering that now. He reached into the back of the drawer and searched; and eventually, out came the leaflet to march. “Goddammit! I shouldda been marching a long time!” But he had a few days in which to decide. He thought of the march, and he thought of Agatha. He tore up the leaflet; and he held the rose in his hand, and he cried. “Goddammit, that’s a great woman, my woman, and I love her, ’cause I’m feeling that goddamn pain.…” Losing her was too much for him.
When Estelle heard what the man said, she asked him to repeat it. He repeated it; and still she refused to believe she was hearing properly. “Is that what I mean to you?” She had already sensed it. “Is that
all
I mean to you, Sam?” Dishonesty and a sense of the dramatic were becoming characteristic now that she knew she was carrying his child. Sam disowned the child. “Are you kidding?” he shouted, when she told him. He was refusing to be honest. He had found out he wasn’t really impotent. She had found out that she was just a woman, another cheap woman. Yet, had she been back home and this had happened, she would have chosen to keep his child as the forceful weapon to remind him of his past. “Is that all I mean to you, Sam?” There were tears now. But she could have told him a long time ago, all that she meant to him. Her own grandfather had told her grandmother what
she
meant to him. Why should it be any different for her? He had just told her she should have the child (“ … if you’re telling me the truth, if,
if you’re telling me the child is mine, well all right. But a man is never sure a child a woman say is his, is his.” Estelle got so mad, she screamed, “Christ, man! a woman knows! A woman knows!” And when he found that he was blundering, and didn’t have the courage to say he was unfair to her, he said, “How the hell do I know it isn’t Boysie or, or what that other one’s name is, Henry, or somebody like them. It could be one of your own people!”), but perhaps, she should give it up for adoption. It was easy, he said. Many women do it; they sign the paper and the child is adopted, and it goes into a rich, loving home, perhaps the child even gets a university education. “A child like yours, a child with a strike against it to begin with, a coloured child,
must
have a home, must have at least one chance in life.…” He said it all depended on
her
, since it was
her
child. “You would have to decide, Estelle.”
They had talked in Bernice’s apartment, while she was at church, and Mrs. Burrmann had taken the children out. Sam had worried about her being pregnant for a long time, but he had decided that when she told him, he would not be kind to her; he would be cruel, and make her hate him, and make her kill the child. He did not feel he really cared for her: never did. But he was still worried. She sat watching him, hating him; and he sat watching her, hating her, hating himself for having got mixed up with her. Time however, had become a complete circle: it had begun here in this same room; and here it ended. It had begun on a Sunday morning; and now, on this Sunday morning, it ended. “You have to get rid of the child. There’s no question about that,” he said. Estelle was expressionless. She was not crying, she was not angry, she was not sulking. She just looked at him. “I don’t want people to be talking about …” and he decided it was unwise to finish what he was going to say.
He had begun by talking about his summer plans so as to evade the real problem on his mind. Mrs. Burrmann, he said, had decided on Mexico; the children were going on the Monday, to Camp Kipawawa, and he was thinking of going to some northern Ontario resort area to fish. But he hadn’t included her in his plans (though, to be honest, she didn’t expect it); and it was then that the real discussion started.