“Oh, it’s you,” she said, and laughed.
“What’s so funny?” he asked.
“You looked so stunned.”
“Well, seeing you in that get-up—”
“Is that all?”
“I thought I had missed you.”
“Why?”
“And maybe the fact, too, that you weren’t at all surprised by my walking in on you.”
“All kinds of people walk in on me,” she said. “Now that you’re here, sit down.” When she had taken his coat she said, “Thanks for those snow boots, Jim. I’ve tried them on, and they fit beautifully.”
“How did you know they were from me?”
“Who else would do anything like that? Come on, sit down. Haven’t you ever seen a working girl before?”
“Sure, but you’re no mechanic. What are you up to?”
“In a few minutes I’m going to work.”
“In that outfit? Where?”
“A shoe polish and lighter fluid factory. I’m on the shift from four till midnight.”
“Oh, my God!” He threw up his hands.
“You’re comical. What does it matter where I work? I’m broke. I need money. And I’m tired of advertising agencies and so on.”
He almost said, And maybe you can’t get another job, maybe it’s true you have special tastes, maybe people around town are starting to treat you as an outcast; but he checked himself, fearing she might think that he, too, was withdrawing from her. “Just the same, you make quite a picture in that outfit,” he said. “Have you any paper?” On the bureau was some letter paper; he took a piece and sat down at the table.
“What are you going to do?” she asked.
“Just sit there. I’m going to draw you.”
“Really. Are you any good?”
“If you don’t like it you don’t have to buy it,” he said, smiling. “How about helping me with a little background? What do you do in the factory?”
“I’m a crimper.”
“A crimper. What in hell’s a crimper?”
“I crimp the cans that have been filled with fluid.”
“And where’s the factory?”
“It’s a rickety old place down in St. Henri by the canal. And how that place stinks of the cheap perfume they put in the fluid!” she said, laughing. She began to talk gaily. At last she had found a place where she was sure she could be happy. The first day in the factory, she thought she would never get used to the crimping machine – it had a strange mechanical power over her, the cans coming relentlessly toward her on the belt and her snatching at them and her foot pounding rhythmically on the heavy machine; but on the second day she was used to it and could look around at the others, and was reminded of her first days at school, when the faces of the other children looked rough and lopsided.
It was all noise and cursing and laughter with the girls being scolded by Mrs. Maguire, who had charge of them, and Mrs. Maguire being scolded by old Papa Francoeur, the foreman.
“At first I don’t think they welcomed me,” she said. “I guess I didn’t look right. But when people are poor they have to accept each other sooner or later, don’t they?” They let her eat with them at noon time. They all ate in the factory, sitting in a little circle presided over by old Papa Francoeur with his beard, a lusty old French Canadian who had pinched her behind. It was his privilege to pinch all the girls.
“I see,” Jim said unhappily, without looking up from his drawing.
“No, you don’t. You just don’t know Papa Francoeur,” she said calmly. The first day at lunch no one had spoken to her; but next day Mrs. Maguire offered her a cup of tea and said she might turn out to be the best crimper they had had all year, and the French girls, who had pretended they spoke no English, thawed a little. “And you know what Mrs. Maguire said? She said, ‘You’re a Catholic, aren’t you?’ And when I asked her what made her so sure she said, ‘I can tell by your eyes,’ and I laughed and the other girls winked at me. They knew I wasn’t. I think they were convinced I liked them, and before long they were telling me about themselves. It’s a good thing to have someone around you can explain yourself to… You know, Jim, each one of those girls has a secret ambition that tells a lot about them.”
With Mrs. Maguire it was a desperate hope that soon she would have enough money to take a trip to Niagara Falls, because she and her husband had never had a honeymoon and when they had first got married they had planned such a trip. And with Yvette Ledoux, well, there was an unhappy girl! She was always planning to take a job in another factory. The factory ahead where some other girl worked always looked beautiful, but she couldn’t move on because her husband, whom she didn’t love, had T.B. and wouldn’t live and wouldn’t die and she had to support him. But on the other hand Hélène Martin liked the factory; she liked it because it was a battleground where she could fight all day long with the other girls. And another kid, too, Michèle Savard, liked it because she was earning and saving and soon would be able to walk out of her crowded family and have her own cheap room in the St. Henri quarter.
But her happy eloquence, as she revealed how fully she must have made herself available to the factory workers, bothered McAlpine. He had a hard time concentrating on his drawing. “Wait a minute, Peggy,” he said. “Are you sure it’s safe for you down there?”
“Safe? What do you mean?”
“Well, coming home at such late hours.”
It was true that loafers hung around the railroad yards, she admitted, and on her first trip home a man in a peak cap and a short jacket, a man with a wooden leg, had followed her over the bridge, whistling at her and trying to catch up to her with his stiff rolling gait. But since that night she had had company. A young shipper, an eighteen-year-old kid with red hair named Willie Foy, wanted to walk her home because he had picked her out to be his girl, but he had to yield the right to old Papa Francoeur, who was sixty and had heart trouble – and what a droll character old Papa was with his gleeful talk about her shape! On the hill he gasped for breath; he had lots of lust but was afraid of a heart attack; his legs were always swollen from climbing the factory stairs, but he was in debt and couldn’t retire, and the only place he retired from, she said, her eyes bright with amusement, was the door to her house. There he was full of apologies, wanting her to understand he was still a robust lover but was simply all tired out.
“Very amusing,” McAlpine muttered, thinking, she makes herself available to these people and lets them think they can do things with her… Filled with jealous resentment, he pushed the drawing away from him and blurted out, “You can’t stay in that stinking factory, Peggy.”
“Yes, I can, Jim,” she said evenly. “You see, I want to stay there.”
“But you’ve got education, training, refinement. It’s all wrong.”
“Not to me, Jim. I like these people. To you it’s like riding third class. Well, I find that more interesting usually than riding first class. That’s all. How about the drawing? How did it turn out?”
He watched while she picked up the drawing and studied it closely, then went to the mirror and looked at herself. “You’re pretty good, Jim,” she admitted. “It’s me all right. Me in overalls.”
“Here. Give it to me. You need to be named, since we know at last what you are,” he said ironically, and he wrote under the drawing, “Peggy, the Crimper.”
“I like that, too,” she laughed. “Give it to me and I’ll pin it over my bureau.” She fixed the drawing on the wall and saluted it. Now the smell of coffee filled the room, and she got two cups from the shelf.
“Peggy,” he began, sitting down on the bed, “aren’t you being a little pigheaded?”
“I knew it – I knew it,” she said with a sigh. “That’s why I told you the other night to stop pulling at my coattails, professor. Now, let go.”
“For one thing, I know why you’ve lost your job.”
“Oh, so Foley told you,” she said sharply.
“He said you didn’t have your mind on your work, Peggy.”
“What a silly story!” She thrust her chin out. “I know why they let me go, Jim. I was waiting for it. The root of the whole thing is right there. Do you take your coffee black, like I do?”
“All right, Peggy. No sugar.”
“Oh, that patient tone of yours, Jim! If you’d only stop being so mild and injured. If you’d stop making me feel I’m abusing you!” She sat down with her cup of coffee. “I don’t want to abuse you, Jim. It’s just that – well, you’re so damned orthodox. And yet, I don’t know.” She frowned, her head on one side as she regarded him. “I suppose that’s not being fair to you.”
“Are you sure it isn’t?” he asked encouragingly.
“Since I know what you will say won’t impress me, why do I like the way you say it?” she asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Look. Don’t you know anybody else in this town?”
“Dozens of people. I know the Carvers—”
“Ah, yes, daughter Catherine. She’d be just right for you, Jim.”
“Oh, so you can be malicious! Good. Well, I also know Angela Murdock. In fact we’re going to her Sunday night party.”
“Angela Murdock. Well, well, well,” she said merrily. “Of course you’d be at Angela’s, surrounded by the city’s men of good will. You see, I’ve met Mrs. Murdock myself, Jim. Oh, that woman with her beautiful civilized comfortable tolerance!”
“I have respect for Angela Murdock,” he said. “I don’t agree with you at all.”
“Don’t you?” she asked. He had reddened and jerked his head back in a magisterial rebuke, and he looked so solemn that she began to giggle; she burst out laughing. It was the first time he had ever heard her laugh out loud. Her face puckered up, her eyes danced, her breasts shook in the kind of laughter he had been wanting to hear from her; it was so gay and free and infectious that it didn’t matter that she was laughing at him or at Mrs. Murdock. “Oh, Lord, I’m getting a stitch in my side!” she said. Then he started to laugh. She bent over and then straightened up, holding her side. But when her grabbed her lightheartedly and swung her around, shaking her and gasping, “This childish!” she started to double up again, and he didn’t want it to end.
“Well, to think I could get such a laugh out of Angela Murdock!” she said when she got her breath at last.
“I love hearing you laugh,” he said. “But how can you when you’ve lost your job – when you’re stuck down in some stinking factory? How can you be so happy?”
“Well,” she began, frowning and reflecting. “maybe it’s a feeling in myself these days I’ve learned to trust.”
“What kind of feeling, Peggy?”
“I think it’s my whirling-away feeling.”
“Whirling away?”
“Yes. And it’s always led me in the right direction.”
“Since when? I mean starting from where?”
“You mean the first time I was sure of it?”
“Yes.”
“When I first left home.”
“Does that mean that you had a quarrel with your father?”
“Not exactly,” she said, slowly. “We didn’t quarrel. We sort of – well, reached an understanding.”
“An understanding about what?”
“A lot happened to my father after those small-town days. I suppose he learned how to get along with important people; and you have to do it if you’re going to be an important preacher. Anyway, he was called from one church to another, and now he’s pretty highly regarded in Hamilton. Influential people go to his church. A broker named Joe Eldrich, who was the chairman of the city hospital board, a broker, you know, made some investments for him.” With a shrug she added, “How did you think I got to college?”
“But this understanding…”
“Do you remember the Johnson family?”
“And the old house. Sure.”
“Well, one summer, after my third year at college, I was home and one of the Johnson girls, Sophie, wrote to my father. She had come to the city wanting to train to be a nurse. She wanted my father to help her get into the hospital. It seems there had recently been some scandal about admitting Negroes for nursing training. At the time I didn’t realize that the letter might have embarrassed my father, I was so pleased to hear that one of the Johnson kids had got some education. So I wrote Sophie that night, and a couple of days later I met her in a restaurant, and in no time we were good friends again. She was a smart, clean, straightforward girl. She told me that Jock – remember Jock? – was playing semipro baseball in Cleveland. Well, Sophie had sized up the local situation. She knew that if she didn’t have some pull she wouldn’t get into the hospital. Don’t think I was naïve about it: I wasn’t. I knew what I was up against. But with Sophie there smiling at me with such confidence and pride in our friendship I marched her right down to Mr. Eldrich’s office – you know, the broker, the chairman of the hospital board. He was shocked, I suppose, when I said I was counting on him. He concealed his feelings awfully well though. Making my point clearer, I told him I was taking Sophie home to dinner.
“And I did, too, and my father was even more disarming than Mr. Eldrich. He wondered why a smart girl like Sophie would want to bother with anything as tedious as nursing, but he was sympathetic, and then he retired to his study – to meditate, I suppose; and soon he had a caller. Mr. Eldrich joined my father in the study, and Sophie and I waited; and I remember the way she kept watching me. When Mr. Eldrich left, my father called me into the study. The poor man had evidently had a rough time. He said, ‘If only Sophie were a light mulatto – if only she weren’t coal-black!’ and then he talked about the little compromises that had to be made for the sake of harmony in the flock.
“Sophie was waiting for me, and I said, ‘You’re just too black, Sophie.’ It was a cruel thing to say; but I felt cruel, and I was sure it was the way Sophie wanted me to feel. I remember how she looked at me before she hurried away. I watched her running away down the street.
“I went out and walked around myself,” she said. There was a curious hardness in her voice, and sometimes she glanced at McAlpine, wondering why she felt compelled to tell these things. “It was raining, and I stayed out and caught a chill, and I got a fever that lasted three days; and when my head cleared my father was sitting beside the bed. Sitting with his eyes closed and he head bowed. ‘Were you praying for me?’ I asked, not meaning to hurt him, but because I thought I saw his lips moving. ‘Why did you say that?’ he said, and he looked haggard and miserable, and he started to cry. It’s awful to see your own father cry. I felt so sorry for him. For some reason I remembered how he used to fumble with his watch chain. I wanted to comfort him. ‘I can’t pray,’ he said. And then he choked a little and said, ‘I haven’t believed in God for years.’
“He knew what he was and knew how he had been corrupted and – well, we shared the understanding. I knew I could only make him more unhappy by staying at home and reminding him of things. Then it happened; while I was hating his respectable world for what it had done to him, I felt this lightness of spirit; I felt myself whirling away from things he had wanted, whirling in an entirely different direction. I left him. It was right. I’ve always trusted that feeling, and I’ve got it now that I’m down in that factory. Do you see what I mean, Jim?”
“The Johnsons,” he said softly, as if he hadn’t heard her question. “That tumble-down house. I guess I understand.” And he pictured the bare house in the field, heard the laughter of the Johnson children in the flow of their unpredictable, disorderly happiness. “Peggy,” he said, “all this makes you sound pretty much alone, but Foley tells me you had a – that there’s a fellow in love with you. A Henry Jackson or something like that.”
“That’s right. And I don’t think you’d like Henry.”
“No?”
“You probably like people who like you, and Henry would not like you, Jim. By the way, he left New York last night. He’s a commercial artist. Very intellectual.”
“Does he object to your Negro friends?”
“Henry is very emancipated,” she said, smiling.
“If I could only prove to you it won’t work out, Peggy! A good heart can’t smash a brick wall. This false idealism—”
“It’s working out fine,” she said, cutting him off. “And, anyway, there are a lot of things I have to see for myself.”
“Peggy,” he said, taking her hand, “in all of this I’m a stranger, more and more of a stranger; but in another way you’re a stranger, too, if you’d only see it. When I’m with you I feel – well, I feel that neither of us should be here at all.”
“At least I shouldn’t be here.” She stood up. “I should be on my way to work. I’ll be ten minutes late, and they’ll dock me about thirty cents.” She got her snow boots and put them on, and then a short dark blue jacket, and a handkerchief around her head, and started toward the door. “Come on. Let’s go.”
Outside, the cold wind blew the snow against their faces. Taking a last puff at her cigarette, she flicked it neatly out on the road about twenty feet away.
“Can you do it that far every time?” he asked solemnly.
“I can flick it ten feet farther than that,” she said.
He nodded. “Well, I’ll be seeing you, Peggy.”
“Sure, I’ll be seeing you,” she said.
She went down the street toward St. Catherine looking like an inconspicuous factory worker in her blue overalls and yellow bandanna handkerchief; and McAlpine, deeply discontented, watched her go. He stood there, frowning, close to an insight; then he got it. The little Negro section in Montreal had become for her the happy and fabulous Johnson family; and if the Johnsons, knowing her, could love and respect her, why shouldn’t the Negroes down on St. Antoine? If only he could talk with some of them! Perhaps he could get Foley’s friend to go down there with him…