He had counted on sleeping late, but he awoke at seven as usual, with a violent headache. An icy wind from the window he had left open eighteen inches was billowing the curtains and freezing the room. Jumping out of bed, he slammed down the window and, trembling with the cold, crawled into bed and pulled the covers around his neck and waited for the warm bed and the sound of the piping radiator to take the chill out of his bones. Why did I give Peggy the impression I liked the winters? he asked himself. To hell with zero weather! I like the summer.
But not beaches and summer cottages. When he had talked to Catherine about his family summer cottage and his boyhood he ought to have gone on and told her how he had found himself staying away from that Havelock beach. At sixteen he had refused to go any more to the summer cottage. He had withdrawn from that beach forever and had taken odd jobs instead, learning to like the sweltering heat of the city. In those hot months he also learned how to be alone. Catherine might not be able to understand it, but Peggy would agree it was important to be able to enjoy being alone. In the summer, with no one around whom he had to please or impress, he had found a happy summer loneliness which might puzzle Catherine, but which Peggy would understand. Yes, if Peggy could have been there with him in his apartment by the university! How easy it was to imagine her there, watching him as he got up late and went idly to the window to see if the day would be a scorcher, watching him as he went to the door to get the newspaper and waiting while he got his own breakfast and read the paper. She would walk with him in the sun’s glare when the heat from the hot pavement singed his ankles, and she would look so cool in her light summer dress that the corner barber, his friend, standing in front of his shop, would call out, “Jees, don’t she feel this heat at all?” And late at night when the apartment had cooled off and he stood by the open window getting ready to do some work, she would stand behind him listening to the night noises, and then the whole crowded restless city life would reach into the room to remind them they were together and no longer alone…
But the rattle of the icy snow against the windowpane broke his reverie. It was winter. It was Montreal. And he was alone. He got out of bed and went to the window. The street below looked bleak. The temperature had dropped below zero. He could hear the squeaking of boots on the hard snow as pedestrians hurried along Sherbrooke, their heads down against the heavy wind. On such a morning a girl wearing only light rubbers and uncovered ankles could catch pneumonia. Even the poorest girl ought to have warm fleece-lined snow boots, he told himself.
Going out for breakfast, he turned down toward Dominion Square and the Honey Dew Restaurant; after all, it would be just as convenient to have his breakfast there as any other place. His ears began to sting. He had to grab at his hat before it blew off. It was unbearably cold.
The tidy little restaurant at that hour was almost deserted. At the table near the door was the old woman who was always there, an old woman with a benevolent motherly face who sat for hours in the morning and hours in the afternoon without even buying a cup of coffee. McAlpine could have described Peggy and asked if she had come in, but he had made the mistake once before of saying good morning to this woman. If you even looked at her, you were trapped, listening to the story of her kindly life. Her overflowing, possessive motherliness was oppressive. So he got his orange juice, cereal, bacon, and eggs, and listened to the soft, subdued, piped-in music. But it was hard to avoid the eyes of the motherly crone as he watched the door. And the longer he waited the more he thought about those snow boots, and the more he worried.
A thin Englishwoman in a brown coat accompanied by two beautiful children, a seven-year-old boy and a five-year-old girl, both neatly dressed, came in; the mother, having seated the children near McAlpine, went up to the counter to place her order. These two English children had had an early appointment with the doctor. The little boy had in his hand one of the sticks a doctor uses to push down your tongue while he examines your throat. “Now open your mouth, that’s a good girl,” he said gravely to his solemn sister. When she had opened her mouth and he had pressed down her tongue, he shook his head lugubriously. “You have a black mark on a tonsil way back there, Susie,” he said in his best doctor’s tone. “But not really?” Susie said. “Oh, yes, Susie, a big black mark!” he insisted. He was such a good little doctor that his sister was no longer certain they were only playing. Turning to McAlpine she asked anxiously, “But not really?” “Oh, no, Susie, not really,” McAlpine said gently.
He had been asking himself why he should not go along to St. Catherine to Ogilvy’s, buy a pair of snow boots, and leave them at Peggy’s apartment. Now the motherly old woman smiled approvingly. “Everything is so real to a child, isn’t it?” she called. “I’m glad to see they’re well bundled up. Bitter weather, isn’t it?”
But snow boots would cost ten or eleven dollars, and he owed his bill at the Ritz; he was running short of money. The fact that he couldn’t actually afford to buy the snow boots irritated him. To have to hesitate over such a trifling expenditure was intolerable. He folded his scarf around his neck, left the restaurant, and hurried up Peel and along St. Catherine to the department store with a fine brisk exuberant stride.
In the shoe department, when the salesgirl asked him what size he wanted, he blushed and laughed, and the girl laughed. He inspected her foot. It was a nice little foot, too. He compared it in his mind with Peggy’s. He paid twelve dollars for the brown leather snow shoes and went out whistling on his way to Crescent Street.
No one answered his knock on the basement door, and at the main entrance he had to ring three times before Mrs. Agnew, fumbling with the cords of her faded blue dressing gown, came to the door, her grey-streaked blonde hair falling over her eyes. “Yes, of course, you’re one of Miss Sanderson’s friends,” she said, and made him think Peggy had a regiment of assorted friends coming to the house. “I was sound asleep,” she explained, like an old friend. “Why don’t you step in out of the cold? I have a little congestion on the chest, you understand.”
“If you would just take this parcel for Miss Sanderson,” he said, stepping into the hall.
“Of course I will. Here, let me close the door. I get more colds standing at this door. I’m glad you called. I look a fright, I know. But last night— Well, I’m not used to it, you see. It was my cousin from St. Agathe. Mind you, after not seeing him for six months,” she added with a grateful smile. “La, what a man! And I’m not even sure he is my cousin. You understand? What an energetic baldheaded little man he is, and he must be all of sixty! I knew what he was like that evening last summer when he took me out to the Belmont amusement park and we rode all night in those little automobiles that keep crashing and everybody laughing. All night in those toy autos with my grinning little baldheaded man. Such fun it was! And to have him show up last night! It was something, I tell you. A parcel? Certainly, I’ll put it in her room. Who’ll I say left it?”
“Oh, just say a stranger,” he said, opening the door and starting down the steps.
“No, wait,” she called. “You’re not a stranger.”
“Yes, I am.”
“But not really,” she called out. “Not really.”
“Oh, yes,” he called back, waving and laughing.
The wind felt good on his cheeks. The air was dry and bracing. It was an exhilarating day; and he could hear the pretty little English child as she turned to him asking anxiously, “But not really?” And he could not get the phrase out of his head. It was as if all the people who had ever had any authority in his life had been watching him buy snow boots for a white girl who liked Negroes, and knowing they had been watching him, he enjoyed it immensely. His father in consternation said, “Oh, but not really!” Old Higgins, incredulous that he could have been mistaken about him, murmured, “But not really!” And the officers in the ship’s wardroom, particularly Captain Welsh, with his decorations, grew red-faced and gasped, “Oh, not really!” “Oh, no, not really!” said the president of his university, looking alarmed. “My God, no, not really!” cried Mr. Carver.
“Oh, yes,” McAlpine said aloud, chuckling with satisfaction, “really!”