I wake up rigid, jaw clenched, the names MacLellan, Fraser and Eliot running through my mind. Who are they? I think, bewildered. Friends of my father’s? Famous explorers? Then it comes to me. Today is my first day of work.
I take a shower, fix my hair, put on my yellow pleated skirt and matching bolero jacket. But I am only observing the formalities. I now understand why condemned prisoners eat a last meal: you just do what comes next. It’s simple enough. Out on the street I join the mass of office workers draining into the subway. I let myself be shuffled onto a packed car. I grab a pole. It’s stifling in here but everyone seems cool and unruffled. The men read newspapers, the women paperback books. There is a dignified atmosphere. The train makes sudden puzzling stops, creeps forward, screeches, thrusts ahead. As one, pretending not to notice, we lurch and sway.
Half of the train empties at the King station. Hundreds of us walking fast in a single direction. I find it bracing while it lasts, like singing the national anthem. Back up on the street, we fan out into columns, mine heading west toward a new black office tower. I enter the revolving door on the strength of someone else’s push. Enter the elevator and fix on the ascending numbers: the reverse countdown to my humiliation. At thirty-seven, I step onto a dove-grey carpet that holds the footprints of earlier arrivals. The brokerage firm takes up the entire floor, and two others besides. This foyer, with its four elevators, is their lobby.
“Louise Kirk?”
It’s the receptionist. She seems far away and lonely down there at the end.
“Yes?”
She smiles and holds up a finger. “Good morning. MacLellan, Fraser and Eliot.” I go over to her. On her large presidential desk, aside from the phone, a pen and a pink message pad, there is only a tubular glass vase holding a single purple orchid. Behind her, attached to the wall, is a box of cubbyholes that looks like those birdhouses you see on farms.
“One moment,” she says,“I’ll check if he’s come in yet.” She rolls her eyes as if at the comical gall of people who phone before nine o’clock. She has short blond hair layered like petals, like a petalled bathing cap. She’s very pretty. “Good morning, Mr. Gage,” she says. “Should I put Mr. Webster through?” Her coral nail polish matches her lipstick and blouse. On the fourth finger of her left hand is a stripe of white skin where a ring was. “Hi there”—speaking to me now—“I’m Debbie Luke.”
“Hi.”
“Pat, you know, the personnel manager, Pat Penn, she called a few minutes ago to say she won’t be coming in today. She’s got a migraine. Poor thing, she gets at least one a week. More when the weather’s like this. Kind of muggy like it is? She has to lie perfectly still with the cold cloth, the ear plugs, the black eye patches, the whole bit. It must be just awful.”
All this said in a thrilled, confidential manner, looking up at me and quickly away and therefore giving the impression that there is far more to the story than she can tell, a surprising, even romantic, complication. I start to speak but she lifts her hand. “Good morning. MacLellan, Fraser and Eliot.”
I wonder what I’m meant to do. Miss Penn instructed me to report to her office first thing. Maybe I can go home. My stomach tightens. If I go now, it’ll be a jailbreak. I won’t come back.
“I’m afraid he’s out of the country until next Tuesday. Could I take a message for his secretary?” There follows a silence during which she writes on her pad while casting me a series of furtive looks that describe what she’s hearing: something perplexing, now exasperating, now reasonable. “Okay,” she says when the call is over. She swivels to poke the message into a cubbyhole. “We just have to hold tight”—swivelling back—“until one of the other girls shows up to take you to Mr. Fraser’s office. It’s way at the other end. He’s already here. He’s here every day at seven. He’s old, you know, a widower, up at the crack of dawn. I don’t want to call him to come and get you, it’s such a long walk, and he’s all bent over. But what a sweetheart.” She turns as the door behind her opens. ‘You’ll just love him. Oh. Speak of the devil. Good morning, Mr. Fraser.”
“Good morning, Debbie.” A deep voice, full and resounding, like a stage actor’s. He glances at me. “I’m expecting a young lady….” Another glance.
Debbie, bursting, as if at the reunion of long-lost relations, nods in my direction.
“Ah!” the man says. “Louise Kirk?”
He regards me frankly, taking his time. He is tall, still a tall man though stooped to a degree that obliges him to tilt his neck back just to see forward. His face is long; his frank look may be partly the result of his chin jutting out. A bald head splattered in liver spots the colour of peanut butter. Eyes the same shade. That expression he has, of both terrible sadness and a private, indestructible joy, is one I’ve noticed before in old men.
He comes toward me, smiling. “Pleased to have you on board.”
We shake hands. “I’m pleased to be here,” I say, trying to sound upbeat, like Debbie. I hate it that I will disappoint him and we will both be embarrassed by all this initial goodwill.
Sometimes I’m lucky. Of all the possible bosses in this city I end up with Mr. Fraser, who—it immediately becomes obvious—needs a secretary only to keep up appearances, which, of course, is perfect, considering that until I learn a few things I’m a secretary in appearance only.
There is very little for either of us to do. In this way, oddly, the job resembles my last one, except that at the bookstore our uselessness was spoken of and ridiculed, whereas here, the situation goes unmentioned (at least it does between Mr. Fraser and me) although not unacknowledged. That we come to work for the sake of inventing businesslike activities with which to fill our days is nothing we can keep from each other. And yet I don’t feel wasted or unnecessary. I feel as though I am involved in the preservation of certain lofty but no longer fashionable virtues. Civility and contemplation.
That first morning, at least a half-hour is consumed by his acquainting me with the contents of my desk. Betty’s old desk. It’s an oak antique, sticky here and there from something spilled. Mr. Fraser and I examine the paper drawer first, its three trays, one for letterhead, one for plain bond, one for the yellow tissue you use to make copies. “I prefer white,” he says of the tissue. “But the fellow who does the ordering tells me it’s no longer available.” I close that drawer. “They don’t make it any more,” he says. I open the top drawer. “Stapler, pencil sharpener,” he says, launching into an inventory. “Glue, Scotch tape, paperclips, thumbtacks.” His deep voice and thoughtful delivery lend each item a fleeting stature. He points a wavering finger at the cardboard thumbtack box. “Is that right? Thumbtacks?”
I open the box. ‘Yes.”
“Now what the Sam Hill did she use thumbtacks for? What’s in that green box there?”
I open it.
“Now what do you suppose those are?”
“They look like those plastic tabs you put on file folders.”
He clasps his hands, pleased. “That’s it.”
I am seated at the desk. He stands beside me, bent forward at an angle that would be alarming if he weren’t so naturally stooped. He presses his tie against his chest to keep it out of the way. It is navy with maroon dots. Very tasteful. His navy pinstripe suit is too large and I wonder if he has recently lost weight, if perhaps Betty’s death took a toll. He is unprepared for the personal items we find in the bottom drawer, though they aren’t much, just a nail file, a pair of reading glasses, a tube of lip balm, a jar of rosewater hand lotion and a white comb. “Ah,” he says. He strokes his tie. “You see, I should have emptied this out.”
“I don’t mind.”
I go to shut the drawer but he says,“No, you’ll be wanting to put your own things in here,” and he reaches in and fumbles around, trying to pick up the nail file, but he can’t get a finger under it, so he picks up the glasses. I take out the rest and hand it to him and he thanks me and puts it all in his jacket pockets.
“Now, then,” standing straighter. He frowns. He seems to have forgotten something. He turns to face the filing cabinets.
“You sure have a lot of filing cabinets,” I prompt.
He perks up. “Twelve in all. Forty-eight drawers.”
They are grey metal, far from new. Four are in his office; the rest have been lined up out here in the alcove to form a wall against the vacant corridor. We’re in an outpost, and there is no escaping a feeling of banishment, but perhaps it is an invited banishment, a compromise, because nowhere else on our long trek from the reception desk did I see any furniture like this, not just the cabinets and my desk but everything: his great hulk of a desk, the wrought-iron coat rack, a magnificent marble-topped credenza, the glass-doored bookcases in his office and the oil paintings he has in there, four or five from the quick glance I got, all of sailing ships.
He waves toward the filing cabinets and says,“One drawer for every year I’ve been in the brokerage business.”
“Forty-eight years,” I say. I can’t even imagine living that long.
“June the sixth, nineteen twenty-one, that’s the day I hung out my shingle. It’s just a coincidence, though, the drawers being the same as the years. I mean to say, we file alphabetically by client name. Do you want to take a look?” He asks this doubtfully.
“Sure.”
We go to the nearest cabinet, the uppermost drawer, whose label reads “Nyman – O’Farrel.”
“Should be two l’s in O’Farrell,” he says, peering. He pulls the drawer open with effort, a grim ferocity jumping to his face. “Runners need greasing,” he says. Inside, the files are jammed and disorderly, papers sticking out of folders, name tabs falling off. He closes it and tugs opens the one beneath and it’s just as chaotic. “I suppose they could do with some tidying up,” he says.
“Get rid of all the inactive ones,” I offer, surprising myself. I didn’t realize I knew about inactive files.
“Well, now,” Mr. Fraser says,“if we go that route, we’ll empty them out. Ninety percent of these people are no longer in the land of the living.”
“Oh.”
He smiles. His lips are as thin as string, quite red. His smile is amused but sympathetic, and the thought comes to me that he requested a secretary who was inexperienced and uncertain, although he wouldn’t have been so explicit. “Who will put up with me,” he might have said.
The following weeks are a lulling, protected time reminiscent of the dreamlike days after an illness when the worst is over but you’re still in bed. At work the phone rarely rings, few people drop by. Mr. Fraser himself leaves me alone once he has established that for the next several hours I will be reasonably occupied. On my desk, when I arrive at nine o’clock, there are always several letters waiting to be typed. He has written them out on lined foolscap in a slightly shaky but legible hand and included the date and the person’s address, though I could easily have found the address on his Rolodex.
“My thoughts flow more freely from the pen,” he told me the first morning, and I wondered if he’d heard I wasn’t very good at taking dictation. After a few days I wondered if he’d meant it as joke, his thoughts flowing more freely, because one letter is hardly different from the next. “Apologies for having been out of touch lately,” he starts out,“but as you may know Betty passed away in July, losing her long hard battle with cancer, and I am only now getting back into the swing of things.” Then he asks after the man’s family—he trusts that the wife is well, that the children and grandchildren are keeping out of trouble. Which brings him to his own child, Jonathan: “Jonathan’s wife, Hazel, gave birth to another son on June twenty-ninth. I’m arranging for the whole kit and caboodle to fly in from Halifax over Christmas.” As a P.S. he encloses an article cut out of the Financial Post or the Globe and Mail. “In case you missed it,” he says. Or,“Thought this might be of interest.”
When I bring him the typed versions, he reads them over slowly, more than once. In the end he makes one or two arbitrary changes: “I’m arranging” might become “I’m making arrangements,” or the other way around; “be of interest” can torn into “be of some interest” or “pique your interest.”
“Sorry,” he says, giving the letters back.
“That’s all right,” I say. And it is. I’m glad of the opportunity to practise my typing.
We can stretch this out, the typing and changes and retyping, until Hank Bell arrives, pushing the mail cart. Hank is a spectral man. Blond, very pale, of indeterminate age, always smiling, always humming mournful tunes. He drops on my desk an impressively large bundle, but it’s mostly annual reports and newsletters. I open everything, pile it neatly and take it into Mr. Fraser’s office. Now it’s ten-thirty, time for me to put our china cups and saucers on the tarnished silver tray and walk the length of the corridor to the executive kitchen where nobody ever is but where fresh coffee awaits in a stainless-steel pot. There are packaged cookies as well: Fig Newtons and shortbreads. I take one of each for each of us.
Back in Mr. Fraser’s office I set down his cup and he hands me two client files, two new ones every day, from which I am to remove any correspondence pertaining to the Ontario Securities Commission. For about a week I almost believe there is some kind of investigation to be conducted, but as the correspondence mounts in a tray on his desk, I let that notion drop. I am touched by his meting out of the files. I feel that he isn’t so much prolonging the work as limiting the amount of time I spend on any one unnecessary activity, taking care that I don’t get too bored. It may be he also hopes to acquaint me with the business, because you can’t read so many letters without picking up a few things, such as that a stock is a certificate, not, as I had imagined, a metallic bar or a plaque. You can’t read so many letters, written over so many decades, without learning about his family, either. Presumably he means for me to know that his wife’s name was Pam and that she died five years ago of a heart attack. That Jonathan is a chartered accountant. That there was another, older son, Eric, who was killed in a car accident on January thirty-first, 1960, which, coincidentally, is the same day my mother disappeared.
I usually finish the files at around twelve-thirty, twelve forty-five. At five to one Debbie phones to ask if I’m ready, and I meet her at the reception and we take our sandwiches to the underground mall where we each buy a carton of juice, then find a bench to sit on. Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays we are joined by Lorna Lawton, a snide chainsmoking girl who works in the retail sales department and whose lunch hour changes on Tuesdays and Thursdays for a reason so infuriating to her she can’t seem to speak of it. We talk about the other employees, or Debbie does. She is indiscreet and conspiratorial and charitable. Lorna is hateful, blowing smoke and muttering “that bitch” and “that bastard.” Sweet, humming Hank from the mail room is “that moron.” Mr. Fraser she is a little easier on, in my presence anyway; him she calls, with something approaching tolerance,“the hunchback.”
I wonder why Debbie is friendly with someone like Lorna, but then I also wonder why she took so immediately to me. The very first day, as I was leaving to go home, she said,“I have to tell you, you’re not at all what I was expecting.”
“How do you mean?” I asked fearfully, thinking she meant unqualified, but she said,“Oh, you know, young, on the ball.”
The second day, introducing me to Lorna, she said,“Louise is nobody’s fool,” and again I had no idea what she was talking about let alone how, after scarcely more than an hour in my presence, she could make such a claim. It reminded me a bit of Don Shaw, the groundless presumptions, except that with Debbie I get the feeling she thinks I am smarter and better than I am, as opposed to darker and sexier. She flatters me excessively and maybe insincerely and yet I sense no harm in her. Quite the opposite. She says she loves my hair. I tell her she’s crazy, my hair is horrible, it’s lank. She smiles as if we both know better. She says she wishes she had my figure, and urges me to try on clothes I can’t afford. This is after we’ve eaten, when there’s still time to window shop. Lorna, who is also skinny and lank haired, tags along, snarling. I take for granted that I’m included in her list of enemies, although back in the office she always walks me to my alcove while resuming some earlier rant. At my desk she seems affronted when I sit down, she acts rudely dismissed.
“See you later,” I say to her back.
I work on shorthand exercises. At two-thirty Mr. Fraser returns from the Baron, a steakhouse where he has eaten lunch since the end of the Second World War. As he hangs his hat on the coat rack he asks how I’m doing, is everything working out? I suspect that the question comes at this time of day because he’s had a drink and is loosened up.
I tell him I’m fine.
He says he’s glad to hear it. His woebegone, radiant eyes are a little tired by now, a little slow to take me in.
In the afternoons I photocopy any articles he circled from the morning papers. Then I go through his A-F Rolodex and type up fresh cards and throw out the old ones, unless there’s a red D written beside the name, standing for Deceased. These cards, which represent not even ten percent of the total (apparently the system stopped being updated decades ago), are to be removed and placed on his desk. What does he do with them? Tucks them away somewhere, 1 suspect.
At four-thirty I water Betty’s African violets and rinse out the cups and saucers in the executive kitchen. At five I poke my head into Mr. Fraser’s office to say goodnight. Often he is reading from a volume of his twenty-four-volume set of the Encyclopaedia britannica. “Oh, Louise,” he says, as if returning from a dream. “Goodnight, my dear. And thank you.”
Evenings.
My father has been by to stabilize the Murphy bed (a matter of tightening screws) and to show me how to work the stove. I now turn on the burners with aplomb. For a couple of nights I listened to classical music on the radio, as in my old fantasy, but against a backdrop of violins and harpsichords the apartment took on a spinsterish aspect, so I switched to the FM rock station. Dinner is scrambled eggs or spaghetti. On Wednesday or Thursday—half a week away from Mrs. Carver’s Sunday roast and the leftovers I brought back to make sandwiches with—I treat myself to meat: a fried pork chop or a Salisbury steak cooked under the broiler. I eat sitting at my desk. After stacking the dishes in the sink (to be washed as needed), I rinse out my pantyhose and hang them, like a girl in a French movie, over the shower rod. Then I brew a pot of tea and drag the chair to the kitchen window so that I can look at the five-storey apartment building across the drive.
I have assigned the residents occupations and names. The place where the windows are always open, even when it’s raining, where the long grey curtains stream out and hang against the brick and nobody is ever home, the guy there—it must be a guy—is a bartender, maybe a cab driver, named Ed. The middle-aged, big-breasted, red-haired woman who vacuums in a see-through negligée and whose windowsills are lined with books, she is Madame Broulé, a high-school French teacher. Directly beneath her is Glenn, the lowly government clerk brooding over his glory days as a varsity football star; this from a silver cup on his sill (it looks like a trophy) but also from how he always seems to be sitting at his kitchen table, smoking cigarettes in the gloom, a big man wearing a tie and sports jacket and smoking for as long as I watch.
When the teapot is empty I drag the chair back to the desk and spend an hour or so working on my office wardrobe, making small, updating alterations to cuffs and collars. Then I iron whatever outfit I plan to wear tomorrow. At nine-thirty I get into my pyjamas, pull the bed out of the wall and lie down to read Jane Austen. By ten-thirty I’m asleep.
Saturday nights aren’t so manageable. I get agitated, I feel I should be out at a movie or a restaurant. Except I don’t want to go alone, and who could I call to go with me? Debbie plays contract bridge Saturday nights (as well as Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday nights, one of the reasons, she admits, her dentist husband left her for a divorcée ten years his senior, but Debbie didn’t care because he was so depressed all the time, crying on the toilet, wishing he was a glass blower or wood worker and yet terrified of being poor). That somebody with the opposite of a poker face could be a card sharp seems unlikely, but apparently Debbie is well known in bridge circles. She thinks I could be a card sharp, too. “You’ve got a quick mind,” she says. ‘You’ve got the competitive spirit.” I do? She has said I’m always welcome to kibitz, which means watch her play. Maybe one night I will. Not on a Saturday night, though; I can’t imagine just sitting quietly, hour after hour, on a Saturday night.
Who else is there? Alice Keystone. A few weeks after I moved in, Alice phoned to tell me she’d got a part-time job selling religious children’s books door-to-door. She hinted at wanting to drop by one evening, but I pictured her in that teacup-patterned dress she used to wear and it made me feel panicky, as if I could be pulled back to high school and the misery of last year, and I put her off, I said,“It’s so hectic at work, I just come home and eat something and fall into bed.” I promised to phone her when “things let up.”
There’s Lorna. Who spends her Friday and Saturday nights drinking at a bar called the Pigskin, where motorcycle-gang types try to pull her onto their laps, but “if you tell them to go fuck themselves they back off.” The bartender is a friend of hers, that’s why she goes, he gives her free drinks and lets her pee in the lane outside the kitchen door so she can avoid the disgusting toilets. “You should drop by,” she has said more than once.
There’s Abel.
Sometimes I change into black jeans and a black sweater and go out and buy cigarettes at the corner milk store, then walk around the block smoking and coughing and feeling nauseated and intriguing. One night I ride the subway and try to cheer myself up by seeing everybody through Abel’s eyes. It’s hard at first, but I get the knack. You have to tell yourself that there’s a saving grace, it’s there somewhere. Forget the big ears, concentrate on the shiny hair, the luscious lips. Don’t see fat, see robust, see an intelligent face. The smelly drunk snoring in the corner, what’s he got going for him? A Roman profile, red socks—a debonair touch—although maybe they’re the only pair he owns.
Eventually my mood lifts enough that I don’t mind going back to my empty apartment. I get off at Yonge Street and transfer to the northbound platform. I imagine Abel somewhere in the city, on a street or even on another subway platform, wafting along on this same feeling of brotherly love.
And then a crazy-looking man hurries down the platform and stops right beside me, so close that our shoulders touch. I step aside. He holds up to his ear a transistor radio, which is blaring static. He switches the radio off and says into the speaker,“Headquarters, come in, come in.” I move farther away. He follows. He turns the radio on again and listens to more static, then turns it off and says,“Suspect approximately five foot five, light brown hair, slight build.” He brings back the static. “Roger,” he says decisively and comes up to me and puts a hand on my shoulder.
I jerk free. “Don’t.”
“I’m afraid I have to bring you in for questioning, Miss.”
“Leave me alone, please.”
He fumbles with the radio, not so adept now, catching fragments of music. Flustered, he switches it on and off. I walk quickly down the platform. “Suspect resisting arrest,” he says, hurrying after me.
He reaches out a hand, and I lurch to one side, banging my thigh against the arm of a bench.
“Shit,” I say.
“Let me help you, Miss.”
I swing around. “Go fuck yourself!”
He swallows. The other people on the platform ignore us. Do they think we’re having a lovers’ quarrel? He rushes away, muttering at the radio. I am close to tears. “Go fuck yourself,” I think. It sounds so vicious. Maybe it’s true that motorcycle-gang members back off to hear it coming out of the mouth of a woman. We skinny, lank-haired, angry young women, our awful power.
Later, around midnight, sitting at my desk, I open the phone book to the R’s. Richardson, Richmond. Richter.
Karl. 241 Grenadier Road.
So they live out by High Park. I lie on my bed with the knowledge in me like a serum. My leg, where I hit it on the bench, throbs. I fall asleep wearing my black clothes.
The next day, Sunday, I take the eastbound subway to the end of the line. Out on the street I sit on a bench and wait for my father. It’s late October, cold and windy, dead leaves rattling down the sidewalk. I carry my dirty laundry in a white plastic basket. My father pulls up in Mrs. Carver’s wreck of a car, he says his own wouldn’t start. As we’re driving north I watch a glove-shaped cloud creep across the sky. Mrs. Carver is at the house, cooking dinner. She’s always there now but never overnight, if the two of them are to be believed. I think they are. We eat roast pork, sweet potatoes, green beans, a lemon meringue pie for dessert. My father drives me back downtown. Somehow the bag of leftovers ends up under my clean clothes, at the bottom of the hamper. I don’t realize until the next morning. I don’t realize that the dress I wear to work still gives off a smell of pork even though I’ve sprayed it with perfume. Troy Warren tells me this a couple of years later. He says,“I fell for you anyway.”