At midnight he was with Foley in the Chalet sitting at the corner table in the alcove where the draft from the open window hit him, as usual, on the back of the neck. He kept his scarf on to protect his throat. “I want to look like one of those French intellectuals,” he said. Wolgast was behind the bar, his sleeves rolled up, his bald head shining brightly, and at the other end of the bar Malone and Gagnon, the cartoonist, were having a subdued conversation.
“Well, I go to work for The Sun, Chuck,” McAlpine said quietly.
“You do?” Foley looked surprised. “It’s definite?”
“It’s definite.”
“Starting when?”
“I’ll be working on a couple of columns this week. I’ll let Mr. Carver see them, of course. I get a cheque at the end of the week.”
“How much?”
“A hundred. More later.”
“On staff?”
“On staff. Come on, man, relax. You can believe it. And I don’t have to go down to The Sun. I can work at my own place. Turn in three columns a week.”
“H’m. Not a newspaperman, a journalist! You should get a pair of striped trousers and a cane. Well, you know what it means?”
“Go on.”
“You’re a teacher’s pet. Teacher down there always has a pet.”
“Don’t be such a wise guy, Chuck.”
“Or maybe it’s just Catherine’s hand I see in there. Well, okay, I’m wrong. Maybe you know people better than I do. Where are you going to live?”
“That’s it. I need a typewriter and an apartment.”
“I may be able to help you. I know a fellow in my building who’s moving to Miami in ten days. You could sublet.”
“Well, that’s that,” McAlpine said. Now he wanted to find out all Foley knew about Henry Jackson.
Foley found it amusing to talk about Jackson. “Little Henry,” he called him. Not too much of a success as a commercial artist, he said, but an entertaining kid. How could a boy with a beard be taken seriously? Of course Henry was never quite sure whether he wanted to be a successful commercial artist or a dramatist like Bernard Shaw. He wrote radio plays, and they weren’t so bad either. In fact he was a bright little guy with a chip on his shoulder, and the boys around the Chalet liked him until he got drunk and annoyingly Shavian. The trouble with Henry was that he had been a sickly child; when he was in a good mood he would tell how he had been kept away from school because he had bronchitis twice a year, but those times in his boyhood when he had lain in bed had been important, for his mother, a clever woman apparently, had read Flaubert to him in the French; Henry could recite whole paragraphs from Madame Bovary. Those sick periods had shaped his whole life; he had cultivated a taste for the witty writers of other periods, and naturally had come to believe he was a great wit himself… What was his particular attraction for Peggy? It couldn’t have been his splendid appearance… You should see him. He hadn’t cleaned his shoes in seven years. Everybody in the joint was surprised if he ever came in looking dressed up. McAlpine would know him as soon as he saw him. Was he Peggy’s lover? Well, everybody had taken it for granted he was, and Henry seemed to think so, too. In the last year Peggy and Henry had been together a lot, but whether he was sleeping with her or not, how could you say? One took it for granted they slept together because they both took so much pride in doing exactly what they wanted to do. On the other hand, maybe they regarded it as a novelty not to go to bed. With a couple of inverted exhibitionists a simple love relationship was sometimes difficult, and it was possible they got such excitement out of their spiritual emancipation that a warm embrace would be too vulgar for them. But certainly Henry had been eating with her, reading his plays to her, and staying up all night with her and sharing her interest in primitive African art and Negro musicians. It would be astonishing to everybody if she had only been leading him around by the nose. For the record, then, Henry was her lover, and as to what she got from the bearded boy McAlpine would have to make up his own mind. “And don’t look too eager to do it,” Foley said, with a slow grin. “Here’s the boyfriend now.”
A young fellow of twenty-four with a wispy reddish beard, wearing a sloppy loose brown tweed jacket and grey trousers, the jacket and trousers hanging on his thin body like a tent, had come in and was staring at Foley and McAlpine. But is he alone? McAlpine thought. Where’s Peggy? Henry Jackson had fierce, bright blue eyes and the weakness of his chin was concealed by his untidy little beard. He went limping to the end of the bar to join Malone and Gagnon. On his left foot he wore a special shoe with a built-up heel.
“Look, that foot,” McAlpine whispered.
“Yeah, he’s lame.”
“You didn’t tell me he was lame, Chuck.”
“Didn’t I?”
“No.”
“Is it so important?”
“Well, yes, if you had only told me he was lame…” McAlpine said, protesting Foley’s concealment of a fact that would have helped explain Peggy’s sympathy for Jackson.
Jackson and Malone began to whisper; their heads bobbed together, then bobbed away, and Jackson, turning slowly, glowered at McAlpine. He put his elbows on the bar, meditated, and finally swung full around and regarded McAlpine morosely. Challenging questions were in his eyes: Where did you come from? What makes you think it’s important to you that I’m here alone? You’re an utter stranger. You don’t belong in this at all. She’s nothing to you. What makes you think you can have any right to try and understand what’s happened between me and Peggy, or believe that a guy like you could take my place with her?
Then he slid off the stool and approached the corner table, taking four limping, solemn-faced strides, courting a humiliation.
“Hello, Chuck. Mind if I sit down?”
“A pleasure, Henry,” said Foley, now full of vast good humour. “I think you and Mr. McAlpine should know each other.
“Yeah, I think so,” Jackson said. All his movements were jerky and irritable. When Wolgast came from behind the bar with one drink, which he put in front of McAlpine saying, “This is special – for you, Mr. McAlpine, because you held me up the other night,” Jackson scowled unhappily.
“In fact, Henry,” Foley said slyly, “it looks to me as if you and Jim already know each other.”
“I think Mr. McAlpine has heard of me,” Henry said.
“Sure I have,” McAlpine said.
“Sure you have,” Jackson repeated sourly, and then looked puzzled. “I feel like hell,” he said, trying to laugh. But McAlpine’s intense interest fascinated him. Long explanations could be dispensed with; they understood they had been in the closest communication. “If you and I were contemporaries, McAlpine,” he said arrogantly, “I would try and explain to you; but we’re not contemporaries. The gap is too great. You’re not in my world.” Foley chuckled with vast secret amusement and Jackson scowled. “I think Mr. McAlpine understands,” he said.
“What are you trying to tell me?” McAlpine asked.
“I said my generation can’t expect much from your generation.”
“But why are you so belligerent?”
“I’m making a point. You get it, I think.”
Smoke curling up from the cigarette on the ashtray at Jackson’s elbow made him blink his eyes; he kept on blinking at McAlpine. “Yeah, you get it all right,” he said.
Clenching his fists McAlpine felt his whole body tightening up, and he was afraid of the force of his own inexplicable hostility.
“I seem to bother Mr. Jackson,” he said to Foley.
“I think you have a point there, Jim,” Foley agreed. “Something about you bothers the guy.”
“Nothing about him bothers me,” Jackson said. “I was making an intellectual point – about his generation. Guys like him in colleges in his time chased around reading about the lost ones. All crap. If you’d ever get down and rub your face and hands in the mud—”
“The mud?”
“Yeah, the mud.” His little red beard wagged fiercely; his pale cheeks and his vehemence were comical. Foley smiled broadly and winked at Wolgast, who polished the bar and listened with a knowing grin, speculating on what McAlpine would do when sufficiently insulted.
A waiter entered and gave an order to Wolgast. “Who for?” he asked.
“Tom Loney,” the waiter said.
“Tell Loney to come and speak to me,” Wolgast said, still watching McAlpine. “I don’t mind carrying Loney on the cuff, but last night he insulted me. I don’t like to be insulted.”
“Say, Henry,” Foley said, with mock earnestness.
“What?”
“You’d better admit it.”
“Admit what?”
“You didn’t write the Shaw plays, Henry.”
“Leave Shaw out of this.”
“No Shaw then. Go on.”
“I don’t take professors seriously.”
“Neither did Shaw,” McAlpine said, smiling.
“Are you trying to needle me, McAlpine?”
“Take it easy, Henry,” Foley kidded him. “He’s only saying you didn’t write Saint Joan. Shaw did.”
“Don’t try and needle me about Shaw or Saint Joan. Your friend couldn’t even understand a girl like Joan.”
“‘A girl like Joan,’” McAlpine repeated, and then it struck him: Does he really mean I don’t understand a girl like Peggy? He quickened, and leaned forward, waiting to see what Jackson had meant. He waited jealously for Jackson to reveal that he, being close to Peggy, was aware that she, like Joan, lived and acted by her own secret intuitions. Joan had shattered her world, and Peggy shattered people, too. Not only Malone, but Mrs. Murdock; even Foley. She would shatter all the people who lived on the mountain and the people who prayed on the mountain. Joan had to die, he thought with a sharp pang, simply because she was what she was. And there had been terror in Peggy’s face as Malone’s hand reached out for her; she had sensed that there were many others like Malone, who would destroy her. His intent stare only puzzled Jackson, who glanced questioningly at Foley. It was plain he hadn’t intended the comparison, and McAlpine was relieved. He felt sorry for Jackson. “You’d rather talk nonsense about generations, wouldn’t you?” he asked in a bored tone.
“I see,” Henry Jackson said in a whisper. “I ought to sock you.”
“Don’t overmatch yourself, Henry,” Foley said.
“No,” Jackson whispered. “I won’t.” Turning to Foley he begged silently for some help, not because he was afraid but because he had been seeking a humiliation and now it had come.
The distress in his eyes worried McAlpine. “Look, Henry,” he said. “We’re not really talking about your generation or mine, are we?”
“No,” he whispered.
“Nor about Shaw.”
“No.”
“Nor any of that stuff.”
“I know.”
“So do I,” McAlpine said. “Have a drink with us, will you, Henry?”
“I don’t know why I insult you,” Jackson said. “I don’t feel good, and I got talking.”
“A drink for Henry,” McAlpine called, and Wolgast brought them drinks.
For the next few embarrassed moments Foley made it easier by switching the conversation to last night’s hockey game, and Henry Jackson was able to finish his drink, say he had an appointment, shake hands with elaborate politeness, and leave without a glance at Malone and Gagnon, who were coming toward the table. Malone disregarded McAlpine’s hostile aloofness. He had a twisted, cynical, understanding smile, and McAlpine hated him.
“Mr. McAlpine,” Wolgast said, “I want you to understand that Henry is not always a jerk. I heard him talking to Malone and Gagnon. He has his own little problem. It’s that girl of his. You know her.”
“I know her.”
“I think Henry is now on his way to break her neck.”
“Oh!”
“Yes. You see, Mr. McAlpine,” Wolgast said tolerantly, “the girl is a nigger lover. I knew it the other day. Saw her myself going along Dorchester with a jig.”
“That’s not news to Henry,” Foley protested.
“Mr. McAlpine, You’re a friend of Chuck’s and, so to speak, a friend of the house.” Wolgast glanced at Malone and Gagnon. “You see, Henry just had a fight with her and she called him a ‘white bastard.’”
“Very comical,” Gagnon said sourly. “Little Henry, so very proud of being tolerant and understanding.”
“If it’s so comical, why don’t you laugh?” Foley asked.
“I’m laughing.”
“I don’t hear you.”
“I don’t laugh out loud at myself.”
“Oh, Peggy and you – too?”
“I once toyed with the idea of going to bed with her, yes. A good dinner, much sympathetic intellectual discussion – I do it well. For her to call Henry a white bastard – well, it offends me,” he said angrily.
Gagnon was not one of those French Canadians who had a fanatical pride in race. He had lost his influence with prominent French Canadians after he had permitted his brilliant cartoons, always satirical about French Canadian life, to be printed in a New York magazine. His compatriots said he had mocked his own people for the edification of strangers who wanted to see them as Gagnon drew them. So his indignation astonished them all. “I know what she implies when she calls Henry a white bastard,” he went on scornfully. “The remark implies a sympathy with the oppressed. Racial sympathy! From her? As you say, ‘boloney.’ I fell for it. It seemed to be the way to her bed, I admit, but I talked about the low wages of the French Canadian industrial workers. Ah, that little toss of her head! My compatriots can look after themselves. She likes dark meat. We’re not dark meat,” he said, sounding vindictive. “Why didn’t Henry ask me to go with him? I could hold her while he booted her in the pants.”
“All you mean is that she brushed you off,” Foley said cynically. Then he turned to Wolgast. “Wolgast, why does a girl like that go for jigs?”
“Why? Well, I think I can tell you,” Wolgast said, his cigar ash falling on Malone’s shoulder.
The others leaned close to Wolgast with profound respect, and McAlpine waited, pale and desolate. He wanted to go; but to strut out with an air of offended dignity would be to cheapen her. Nothing they could say could destroy his faith in her, and it was like the night when he had been in the Café St. Antoine talking with Elton Wagstaffe and he had known he was called upon to be always with her, even while she was being viciously misunderstood.
“Go on, Wolgast,” he said quietly.
“Why does a girl like that become a nigger lover?” Wolgast began, with a beautiful expression of philosophical detachment. “To get at the main reason, as Gagnon says, you’ve got to know a little about the girl. But when you get to know her you’ll find she’s always wanted to be in the spotlight and has never been able to make the grade. What’s that big two-dollar word I’m looking for, Chuck?”
“‘Frustrated’?”
“Frustrated, that’s it. Who’s got a match?”
“Here,” Gagnon said, lighting his cigar.
“She’s the little girl who wants to sing when nobody will listen to her, the piano player everybody walks out on. Hell, you guys have been around here, you’ve met some awful earbenders, haven’t you? Why, the poor guys will start saying anything just to get hold of somebody’s ear. A little attention, see? We all want this attention. I don’t think any of us get enough attention. And it makes those little girls I’m talking about get desperate. They’ll do any god-damned crazy thing to make them seem a little different. Well, the ones that go for the coons are showboating in a big way. Everybody turns and looks at them. Everybody talks about them. It’s like travelling with a brass band. You should agree with me, Mr. McAlpine. You’re a historian.”
“Better than that, he’s about the only white guy Peggy bothers seeing these days,” Malone said slyly.
“Oh, they went to college together,” Foley said, brushing him off.
“Just the same, now that Henry has gone, I will move in,” Malone said. “I will lay her.”
“You’re a fool,” McAlpine said.
“I want to know if McAlpine agrees with me,” Wolgast insisted. “I have just made a speech. I have asked his opinion. He’s a scholar.”
“Well, I don’t agree with you, Wolgast.” McAlpine longed to be able to throw a cloak of splendid protective words around her. “I think you all make one little mistake. If she were merely fascinated by Negroes – an exotic taste, yes – that would be a kind of perversion. But supposing she is interested in them only as human beings she has come to know and like – as she might be interested in you or me? If I were a Negro and I liked her it would hurt me to know that I couldn’t have her friendship because I was coloured. I know this, too,” he said, toying with his glass, “if I had some Negro friends and liked them as one human being likes another I think they’d get into the habit of talking frankly in my presence, and I’d hear them talking about little incidents of discrimination going on all over the country in restaurants and trains and hotels. A lot of them are porters and they have these stories of one humiliation after another. Well, if they were friends of mine and I liked and respected them I’d feel ashamed. As a human being, I’d be apologetic. I might sometimes feel contempt for my own race if I had any sense of justice. If I were young and ardent I’d feel guilty and perhaps overly sympathetic. What she’s doing around here may be imprudent and impossible. You might all agree that it’s simply an adventure. But with her I’m sure it’s a noble adventure.”
He had spoken with such dignity and good faith they were all embarrassed.
“He makes speeches like music,” Gagnon said finally. “Beautiful speeches in a pleasant tone. The right kind of music for Peggy. You follow me? There she is, lost in the dark underworld. Montreal’s Plutonian shore. Like Eurydice. Remember the lady? Remember? How did Eurydice die?”
“Bitten by a snake,” Foley said.
“And certainly our little Peggy has been badly bitten.”
“So McAlpine becomes her Orpheus.”
“Ah, yes, there you are. Her Orpheus.”
“Orpheus McAlpine!”
They were all alert, watching him. He called for a round of drinks, but when the drinks came and their attention was diverted he wondered why Jackson had resented him so much. He felt restless. “Sorry, Chuck,” he said, patting him on the shoulder, “I have an appointment,” and he left them. But he stopped just outside the door, waiting; and of course it came: the burst of derisive laughter.
A gust of wind sprayed snow from the roof onto his face and he had to take out his handkerchief and wipe his eyes. He strode up the street, looking up only once at the barrier of the mountain. It was there, of course; it was always there. On St. Catherine, where he slowed down, the moonlight glinted on the steeple of the stone church at the corner of Bishop, and the steeple was a white snow cone thrust against the night sky. All he could think of was that Peggy had got rid of Jackson. He remembered the intimate moments in her room and hoped she might have quarrelled with Jackson over him. That would explain why Jackson had been so resentful.
He turned up Crescent; he looked along the alley to see if there was a reflection of light on the back fence from her window. At that angle it was hard to decide. Going in, he tapped apprehensively on her door. At first there was no answer; and the door, for the first time, was locked. Again he tapped, and then she called, “Who is it?”
Sighing with relief, he said softly, “It’s Jim. It’s not late, Peggy.”
A light appeared at the crack under the door and it just touched the toes of his galoshes. She opened the door and stood there in a light blue silk kimono around her white nightgown. She had a black eye.