People who get on the bus at the 79th Street stop are usually people who have been to the museum – art students, tourists, Europeans, Japanese. But the woman who sat in beside me today with her little daughter on her knee, I doubt if she had ever been inside the Met. She seemed Puerto Rican, with a tired yellow face. Perched on her mother’s knee, the little girl stared at me with chocolate-drop eyes, examining me as I examined her. She looked at my mustard suit. I looked at her dress which was white with a lace collar, probably her first communion dress let out. They had pierced her little ears and fitted them out with ugly, tiny gold earrings. How old was she? Nine? Hers was the Juarez face: it could be Mexican. No matter which country they come from down there, they are Indians, with that Indian face, the face of the three little girls of my Juarez dooms, the three little girls who sat on the public bench in the Plaza San Jacinto on that dry, dusty afternoon in El Paso. They had the same stare this child had, the stare that judges without judging. Two years ago (my God, is it two years already?) in the Plaza San Jacinto in El Paso, Texas, three little Indian girls stared me into the dooms. Remember them dooms? Please God, let me forget them. Dry hot winds blow down through Texas, down to the Mexican border, rushing into El Paso del Norte, filling its streets and squares with dust. A border town; it made me think of a cheap army surplus store. At noon, lawyer Guzman’s jitney brought half a dozen of us back to it from Ciudad Juarez and our quick divorces, the jitney crossing Cordova bridge over the muddy ditch that is the Rio Grande, past the US customs building and along a long, dusty road to a bus terminal where the bus from Mexico was unloading people with Indian faces, poor people who crossed the street from the bus terminal like pilgrims going to a shrine, the shrine a long block of cheap clothing, furniture and appliance stores, filled with shoddy goods ‘Made in the USA’.

But El Paso is what I remember best. After the divorce in Juarez I went back to El Paso, ate lunch and then, depressed by the drummers’ atmosphere of the Hotel Cortez lobby, went out into the main plaza of El Paso, across from the hotel, to wander and wait for the plane which would take me back to New York and Terence. The plaza had trees, concrete paths, small formal plots of grass, dusty shrubs, benches with many people sitting on them, and in the hour I had to wait, I dawdled and stood, read the bitter pro-Southern Civil War inscription on the small monument on the north-western side of the square, then came to a more interesting monument, on the north-eastern side, a monument which was a little horsedrawn street car, its driver a store dummy in a Zapata hat, his reins connected to a fairly lifelike dummy mule. A plaque near the mule’s hooves explained that this was the original street car which linked El Paso and Ciudad Juarez; that it had been donated by its last owner to the city of El Paso. And there was the very car, lettered Tranvias de Ciudad Juarez, 1882. I looked at its iron guard rails and wooden panels, looked through its dusty windows and inside, more imaginative than the dummy driver, were large cardboard cutouts of the old street car’s passengers, crayon-coloured, as by a child. Two of the cutouts were of Mexican men in Zapata hats: there was a cutout of a woman with a baby in her arms and, at the rear of the car, a one-dimensional gringo gent with Vandyke beard and, by him, a boy in knickerbockers. Imaginary passengers in a real street car: cutout ghosts from those days when El Paso and Juarez were just sleepy border towns and not as now, a one-day happening for hordes of nervous strangers.

And, while I stood there staring at the Tranvias de Ciudad Juarez as once it was, someone began to yell in Spanish. I turned to look and there, marching up and down along the lines of Mexicans who were waiting for the bus back to Juarez, was a stout young man, blond and sweating, wearing a black-and-white checked shirt, green chinos, orange work boots. In his left hand was a large open Bible and from the Spanish he shouted, I distinguished only the words, ‘Jesus – Jesus Christos’. I stared at this poor Fundamentalist shouter, bringing (he thought) God to the heathen. The Mexicans never looked at him: they stood on the pavement or sat on the public benches like cows in a field at noon. He was flies. They ignored flies. They twitched their heads and gazed about them. The bus would come, yes, the bus would come and carry them back to Juarez and, when that happened, this noise would be left behind. I remember that, at first, their silent unity reminded me of a similar silence that morning when we, the divorce seekers, sat waiting in the lobby of the Hotel Cortez, each of us knowing we were on the same quest, yet each of us alone, like people on a religious retreat in which a vow of silence and contemplation has been taken, travellers on a shameful journey who had abjured our normal American garrulity, preserving in our silence the privacy of defeat. Yet how false that silent unity seemed when, two hours later, the deed done, the papers signed, my companions returned to normal in the jitney, coming back across Rio Grande, normal being nervous jokes, normal being too informative, too eager to be at once restored to that gabby, indiscreet, phoney friendship which is the posture of Americans as travellers.

And so, there in the Plaza San Jacinto, I admired these silent Mexicans who felt no need to joke or grin at each other as they endured the God shouts of the mad gringo. The bus would come. The Mexicans waited in patience and I, taking my cue from them, sat down on one of the public benches, knowing that my plane would also come. And, as I sat there, three little girls sat down on the bench opposite and turned their collective gaze on me. The middle one whispered something to the one on her right, who giggled and set them, all three, to giggling and then the giggles stopped and they sat, staring at me with unblinking chocolate-drop eyes in carved Indian faces. I looked at them and thought they must often see women of my sort, young, well-dressed, alone, nervous: strangers they glimpse once in the plaza, but never again. And in that moment I wondered what sort of woman they must think me to be and then began to wonder myself.

I was a woman who had come from New York, flying thousands of miles to a city I had never seen, sleeping alone in a strange bed in a strange hotel, rising that morning to eat in silence and wait in silence with nine other nervous strangers until a jitney came to take us into a foreign country, to meet a lawyer who hurried us to a foreign court-house, where I was declared a resident of a state (Chihuahua) whose very name I had not known until that day, then was led before a judge who hurriedly unmarried me, changing my name from Bell to – what? What was my name that afternoon in the Plaza San Jacinto? I asked myself, but did not know. Was I now Phelan, no, couldn’t be that, I was divorced from Jimmy, I had to be Mary Dunne, but would I be called that or would I still be called Bell until I remarried and became Mary Lavery?

The three little Mexican girls stared at me. They had always had their names. Soon they would take the Tranvias de Cuidad Juarez across Cordova Bridge and the Rio Grande and then they would be home in Juarez City beneath the Sierra Madre Mountains in the State of Chihuahua in the Republic of Mexico and so it was natural and right for them to be here in this dry, dusty Plaza San Jacinto, but it was not natural for me, although I too could remember when I was a little girl, not so different from them, I was Mary Dunne in Butchersville, in the Province of Nova Scotia in the Dominion of Canada and how strange it would have been for me to sit under the War Memorial Cenotaph in Confederation Square and stare at some odd Mexican lady and wonder who she was. And when I thought of that, I smiled at the little girls but the little girls did not smile back. They stared. My smile failed and it was then that I had the very first of these moments, the first because I could not blame it on a pill, I could not blame it on anything that I knew about, it simply happened and there I was, I could not remember who I was or where I was. I sat in a hot, dusty square, stared at by those childish Indian faces, a blond man shouting ‘Jesus Christos’ in back of me and it was panic, I couldn’t remember my name and I got up from the bench and ran past a line of Mexicans who sat and ignored me. (I was flies.) I ran and then stopped when I saw the front entrance of the Hotel Cortez and it came back into my mind, I am Mary Dunne. I said it over and over. I am Mary Dunne, it’s all right, I am Mary Dunne. But somehow it was not true any more and in the bus that afternoon going back to the airport, to the plane which would take me to New York and to Terence, I remember thinking for the first time what I have thought many times since. I am no longer Mary Dunne, or Mary Phelan, or Mary Bell, or even Mary Lavery. I am a changeling who has changed too often and there are moments when I cannot find my way back.

 

The bus had left the Met, crossed Fifth, Madison, Park, Lexington, Third. My stop came up. I smiled at the mother of the little Indian-faced girl and the mother smiled back at me and moved her knees to let me pass. (Vaya con Dios, said the Chamber of Commerce sign, that day, long ago, as I left picturesque El Paso.)

There was a cold spring wind as I got off the bus, cold on my thighs between my stocking tops and girdle, a cold puff of wind up my spine as I hurried to the corner and crossed on the changing light.

Harold, our doorman, came to hold the door open for me and, as I went in, signalled that he wanted to speak to me. I thought it was probably another parcel. Harold is tall and stout; he makes me feel small. He has a trick of teetering on his heels as he talks. He teetered, looking down at me confidentially, taking a notebook from the hip pocket of his uniform. ‘Mrs Lavery, do you know, a’ (flips pages) ‘a, wait now, let’s see, this gentleman?’

A pencilled name on the lined page: L. O. MACDUFF.

‘Do you know him?’ Harold asked again.

‘No.’

‘Well, he says he knows you. He was here asking me questions. Said he was a friend of yours.’

Harold, looking down at me. Harold’s head is quite small, too small for the six-foot body and his football-tackle fat. The uniformed cap makes him seem older than he is. Actually he’s just a kid, not much more than twenty. ‘No,’ I told him. ‘I don’t know anyone by that name.’

‘Well, uh, uh, I phoned up on the house phone, you weren’t there, I told him that, then he start ask me all kinds a questions, said he was here on a vacation, he wanted to catch you, then he wrote his name down, told me, be sure you show it to her and tell her I stopped by.’

Robbers, more robbers, came into my mind. ‘What sort of questions?’ I asked in a shaky voice.

‘Well, uh, uh,’ Harold seemed embarrassed. ‘He asked if you had a job now, I mean what hours and what time your husband, I mean he ask if your husband worked at home.’

His eyes caught mine, then avoided my frightened stare. ‘I mean, I thought he was a friend of yours, y’know.’

I told Mad Twin to be quiet, it wasn’t a robber, it must be something else, but she wouldn’t –

‘What did he look like?’ I asked. And Harold pondered, screwing up his little face in a visible act of intellection. ‘Well, uh, uh, he was, uh, uh, kind of a tall gentleman, didn’t look like nobody from a collection agency, you know. I can tell those guys, they often come around and ask about the tenants.’

‘And he wrote his name down. And asked you to tell me he was here?’

‘Yes, ma’am. Oh, and, uh, uh, he said he’d call you. Phone, y’know.’

‘When?’ (I was trying to get a hold of myself: I was shaking and Harold had noticed.)

‘Didn’t say any special time, Mrs Lavery.’

‘Well, if he comes around again, you just be careful. There was another man here this morning, pretending he wanted to look at our apartment. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if they were collaborators, there are these gangs of apartment robbers I read about. Now – you were on this morning – do you remember sending a man up to our apartment, an old man with a little white beard?’

Harold thinks. ‘A beard? Uh, uh, yeah, yeah, I remember. Ah, don’t worry, Mrs Lavery, we don’t let nobody go up unless the tenant is at home. I mean that’s our job, y’know.’

‘I know. But still, well, there are these – these crooks nowadays are very smooth. This article I was reading, well, you’d be surprised at what they get away with.’

By now, I had offended him. He reached up his hand, tilted his cap down over his nose, scratched the back of his head, and eyed me under the tilted uniform peak of his cap in a way which said I had gone too far.

‘Knock wood, Mrs Lavery, we haven’t had no robberies here. Not the kind you’re talking about. No, ma’am.’

‘All right. Thank you, Harold.’ (Thinking: I must get upstairs, take an aspirin or something.)

‘That’s all right, Mrs Lavery.’

He watched my progress towards the elevator and I knew that it would never be the same again between Harold and me. Doormen divide tenants into mad and sane and now, with my babble about crooks and magazine articles, I had crossed the line and joined the complainers, the dotty old dames, the suspicious tenants he must jolly along. From now on, he will wink behind my back as I have seen him do when old Mrs Spritzmayer goes into her plaint.

At the elevator, a wan-looking woman in a plaid slack suit waited, tugging at a big brown poodle on a chain. As we went into the elevator together, she smiled at me. The poodle’s wet nose touched the back of my hand. I jumped.

‘It’s all right, he’s friendly,’ she informed me in a twangy voice. (I don’t give a damn if he’s friendly, take his great wet snout off me.)

But, craven as we all are in the face of Man’s Best Friend, I smiled and nodded to his owner and pretended to smile at the animal, which reciprocated by shoving his nose up under my skirt. At last, she tugged on the leash. The dog yelped. She ruffled his ears affectionately as I watched for the reprieve of my floor. I got off without looking back.

There was no paper bag on the chair in the hall. So Ella Mae had gone. I heard voices, Terence’s and some other man’s, but not what they said, for Terence’s study door was closed. I closed the front door with a bit of a slam, hoping Tee would hear. And he did. His door opened and he smiled at me. I thought: I love him.

‘Somebody called MacDuff rang you up,’ he told me. ‘I left the number in the living-room. He said it’s important and wants you to call. How are you?’

‘Fine,’ I said. Two men looked out at me from Terence’s room. Beau Sales, a composer, and Sam Schactman, a choreographer. I gave them dinner here about two months ago when Terence and they started talks about a revue Tee is writing with them. I hadn’t seen them since. ‘Hi, there,’ said Beau, who is smart and showbiz, and didn’t even try to put a name on me. The other, Sam, more gemütlich, knew he should know me, my name was on the tip of his tongue. But not quite. ‘Hi, there,’ he said. ‘Ah . . .’

‘You remember Sam and Beau, don’t you, Martha?’ Terence said.

‘Of course,’ I said. ‘Hello, there.’

Sam took the bait. ‘That’s a nice hairdo, you got there, Martha. Cool.’

‘Thank you,’ I said. I looked, straight-faced, at Terence and he gave the smallest wink. Only yesterday I bet him none of his show-business friends even knew my first name. Terence remembered. Martha. I love him.

Yet yesterday when I made that bet with Terence it was not funny, it sounded like a complaint. Perhaps part of my uncertainty about who I am these days is because, living with Terence, I am introduced to everybody as Mrs Terence Lavery. ‘You mean the Terence Lavery, the British playwright, that one?’ Yes, that one. When Terence and I meet new people, eyes go to him. If I start talking to a stranger at a party and Terence comes up, I find I may as well forget whatever it was I was saying. Oh, I suppose men still look at me, but with this difference. When they hear who I am they at once ask if Terence is with me and what he’s doing these days. Then we talk about Terence.

‘We won’t be much longer, will we, fellows?’ Terence asked Sam and Beau. They, eager to please him, said no, not long. I went into the living-room, where, on the writing desk, I found a pad with Terence’s handwriting on it.

 

MARY

Call L. O. MacDuff, Room 2020

Barbizon Plaza. Says it’s urgent.

 

The Barbizon Plaza’s where Janice Sloane is staying. A lot of Canadians stay there. I decided it was better to find out who L. O. MacDuff was than to stand about worrying. I got the phone book and dialled the number.

‘Babizon Plaza, good afternoon.’

‘Room 2020, please.’

It rang and rang and rang until the operator came back on. ‘Room 2020 does not answer. Would you care to leave a message?’

‘Yes, please.’

(I thought I would leave my name, so that whoever it was would know I’d called.)

‘One moment, please.’ Click-click-click. Then a new voice, male: ‘Front desk, good afternoon.’

‘I’d like to leave a message for a Mr MacDuff in room 2020.’

‘One moment, please.’

I waited.

‘Did you say MacDuff, madam?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’m sorry, we don’t have a MacDuff registered.’

‘But I got a message from a Mr MacDuff in Room 2020.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Well, who do you have in Room 2020? Perhaps my husband got the name wrong?’

‘I’m sorry, madam, we’re not allowed to give our guests’ room numbers.’

‘I see. Well, would you leave a message for whoever is in Room 2020 that Mrs Lavery called.’

‘Yes, madam. Mrs Lavery. Thank you.’

I hung up and, I don’t know why, suddenly became convinced that this L. O. MacDuff person was from Butchersville, was someone my mother had instructed to look me up in New York. Then I remembered Mama and her polyp and decided, never mind what Dick says, it won’t hurt to call her. Besides I can use this MacDuff person as an excuse for calling. So I looked up her number and direct distance dialled.

It rang, it rang.

An operator’s voice. ‘What number are you calling, please?’

‘Area code 902 and the number is 678–2762.’

‘Thank you and thank you for giving me the area code. That circuit is overloaded, let me try to get your number for you.’

She dialled. I heard a number of clicks and then a crackly, small-town voice. ‘Butchersville.’

‘Operator, this is New York calling. We are trying to reach 678–2762. Will you try that for us, please?’

‘Six seven eight two seven six two,’ said the voice back home. A dialling sound. Then the phone rang in my mother’s kitchen, rang and rang and rang, while we three women, none of whom had ever seen the other, sat listening across the wires. It rang, it rang.

‘That would be Mrs Dunne, wouldn’t it?’ said the voice from home. I could imagine her, some Mrs Tiggy Winkle in a knitted grey cardigan, having a cup of tea as she answered the calls.

‘Yes, that’s right,’ I said.

‘Guess she’s not home,’ said Mrs Tiggy Winkle. ‘Want to leave a message?’

Big-Time Operator relayed the question: ‘Ma’am? Care to leave your number, the party could call you back?’

‘No, thanks, it doesn’t matter.’

‘I could try for you in, say, half an hour?’ Big Time offered.

‘No, it’s all right.’

‘Thank you then,’ said Big Time. ‘And thank you, operator.’

‘You’re welcome,’ said Mrs Tiggy Winkle. We all hung up, and I decided I would try Mama later, maybe after dinner. I tried to remember if Terence had said something about going out to a movie. I wasn’t sure. I love movies but when I’m nervous they sometimes don’t work, I can’t get with them, I simply sit in the dark, my mind dithering, waiting for them to end.

Movies, Jimmy was the one who started me going: he and I would go five nights a week in Toronto when and if we had the money. Hat disliked movies, although he pretended to like them. The only films he ever really wanted to go to were big coloured excitements which bore me. Terence likes movies and we go a lot. But Tee is professional in his interest, so most of the time we go to foreign films. And that’s all right. I go where I’m took, as the girl said. The only time I had rows with anybody about movies was during the period Hat and I lived in New York. There were so many good ones on then, but we hardly saw one of them. Sometimes I’d ask if we could go to one and Hat would say sure, and even pick a night, but when that night came, suddenly he’d have an article to finish or some phone calls to make and he’d go into his study and stay there until minutes before the last show, then rush out and we’d take a taxi to the theatre, almost always arriving after the last show had started. Then Hat would say he wasn’t going to see only part of the film and why didn’t we pop around to Downeys for a nightcap instead? Hat always did what he wanted, not what you wanted. Always.

But Jimmy, I was thinking of Jimmy, he was the movie-goer. James Patrick Phelan, the Jimmy of twelve years ago when he was twenty-one and I was twenty. When I am an old woman, Jimmy will remain unchanged for me, a twenty-one-year-old boy with a big Adam’s apple, laughing with a nervous bark, inhaling his cigarettes the wrong way and coughing as though he will choke. Always the young boy, as Hat will always be the man I knew in those last months, irritable, touchy, skin slightly red and puffy, fingers combing nervously through his grey-streaked hair. Yes, Hat is cast as growing old, Jimmy as the boy I ran away from home with. Jimmy and I and the idiot, driving all together to Toronto, that’s how we started our married life. If you could call ours a married life.

The idiot’s name was Tom Dawkins: his family was very rich. Poor Tom had a mental age of five or six and was afraid of planes and trains, so, every year when he spent Christmas with his mother in Toronto (his parents were separated), he had to be driven there. The old father, who lived in Halifax, offered Jimmy two hundred dollars and expenses to drive poor Tom to Ontario in a rented car and Jimmy (who knew I was daydreaming about joining Catherine Mosca’s acting school in Toronto) came to me and said that he had this big car and two hundred dollars and why didn’t we get married and go live in Toronto. Jimmy was on the outs with his family at the time: his mother had hoped he’d become a priest but, instead, he had flunked out of Dalhousie and was refusing to go to Mass on Sundays. I had just finished university but all my BA had got me so far was an offer of a filing clerk’s job at the government forestry lab in Fredericton. At twenty, my life stretched ahead of me like an empty horizon. I wanted to act, I wanted to do something which would take me away for ever from Butchersville, from the Maritimes, from the lives and jobs and ambitions of the other boys and girls around me. I know. It sounds mad to the me I am today. I liked Jimmy but I didn’t love him. Nor did he love me (he thought I was beautiful and wanted to go to bed with me), and I suppose you could say we used each other. But we didn’t know that, all we knew was the hopeless feeling of that empty ordinariness stretching down the years ahead of us. And, suddenly, here was something mad, a ride to Toronto, a two-hundred-dollar grubstake (it seemed a fortune to us, neither of us had ever lived away from home), and so, without a word to Mama or to Dick, I got up one morning, smuggled a suitcase out of the house, and took the bus over to Dartmouth where Jimmy and Jimmy’s friend O’Keefe were walking about in the snow on the street corner in front of an old white frame house belonging to a Unitarian minister and a few minutes later we were in the minister’s parlour getting married, with O’Keefe and the minister’s sister as witnesses, and, afterwards, we got on the bus and came back to Halifax and had our wedding breakfast in a greasy spoon. (I remember O’Keefe had bought a bottle of Irish whiskey in honour of Jimmy and they put some in my coffee. It was the first time I had ever had any liquor and I thought people must be crazy to drink it.) Then, after breakfast, we all got on another bus and went out to the rich part of town and got off at the very grand avenue where the Dawkinses lived and Jimmy set off all alone, going up the driveway beside a huge old grey mansion while O’Keefe and I waited, farther down the street, stamping our feet to keep warm behind the snowbanks shovelled up on the pavements, me with the remains of a ten-cent bag of confetti in my hair and bits of rice in the collar of my good coat and down my neck, O’Keefe holding my suitcase and cursing because Jimmy was gone for ages until, finally, along the street came this huge black Chrysler Imperial limousine with Jimmy driving it and beside Jimmy was the idiot, only he didn’t look like an idiot, he was a tall stout man with blond hair and a black homburg on his knees and he wore a suit with a waistcoat and a beautiful black overcoat with an astrakhan collar, and O’Keefe and I both had the same idea, this was the idiot’s father, so, even when Jimmy stopped the limousine right by us, we pretended we weren’t with him, we didn’t even look at him until he got out of the car and came up and said, ‘What’s up, aren’t you coming?’ And O’Keefe said, ‘That’s not him, is it?’ and Jimmy said, ‘Sure it is, it’s old Tom,’ and he went over and opened the front door of the limousine and old Tom smiled at us and Jimmy said, ‘All right, Tom, you get in the back, I want Mary to sit up front with me.’ Right away, old Tom stopped smiling and then a six-year-old in a forty-year-old body said, ‘No, I won’t. It’s my car and I always sit up front.’ So Jimmy thought about this for a moment and then he said, ‘No, it’s not your car, Tom, it’s just a rented car. Now, you get in the back.’ But old Tom shook his head. ‘It’s my daddy’s car,’ he said and that was that, there was no budging him, so I got in the back with O’Keefe and took a back seat to the idiot on my wedding day and we drove to O’Keefe’s house where O’Keefe kissed me and gave Jimmy the rest of the Irish whiskey and then we started off like escaping convicts, driving down those winter roads to freedom. I had told my family I was spending the weekend in Halifax with Shirley Davis. My plan was to announce my marriage as soon as we reached Toronto, which we thought would be in three days and so, for that reason, we drove late into the night until we reached the United States border at Calais, Maine. Which was our first mistake, because old Tom was hungry and kept wanting us to stop for dinner and when Jimmy said he wanted to get on to the border old Tom asked for a drink instead and Jimmy let him have it which was mistake number two, because it seems old Tom wasn’t allowed to drink and this was written down with a lot of other instructions which the old father had given Jimmy but which Jimmy had put in his pocket and hadn’t yet bothered to read. Anyway by the time we reached the motel at Calais old Tom had had a couple of big belts and was high and fell asleep over dinner so that we had hell’s own job getting him back to the motel. Jimmy, of course, had been instructed to share a double room with old Tom, but, naturally, it being our wedding night, Jimmy had other ideas so we registered at the motel as Mr and Mrs Phelan in the double and put old Tom in a single cabin next door.

That was the first night I ever slept with a boy. It was a disaster. Jimmy knew even less than I did. I remember we went to bed in our underwear and after he had taken off my bra, he clutched me to him suddenly, pulled down his shorts, and ejaculated on my leg. And then we got all hotted up again, kissing and feeling each other, and after an awful lot of fumbling he ejaculated again, and again it was too soon. I felt like crying but didn’t and pretended it was all right and asked for a drink and Jimmy got out the bottle and I had my second drink in my life and we talked for a little while and then I felt sick and was sick and we talked some more and he kissed me and kissed my breasts and rubbed himself against me then, suddenly, fell asleep. I lay holding him for a while, then got up and was sick a second time. I have a vague memory of myself in that motel bathroom at four in the morning, sitting on the throne and telling myself, well you’ve done it now, this is the first real mortal sin in your life. And I didn’t mean the sins priests say are sins such as sex and drinking. I meant Jimmy. I said to myself you are a rotten person, Mary Dunne, you’ve married him, yet you don’t even want to kiss him, let alone live with him the rest of your life. Talk about my rotten father, I felt I was twenty times as rotten as he ever was, I deserved to be sick, I deserved not to sleep, but I did sleep, I got back into bed beside Jimmy and we both slept a dead sleep until almost ten in the morning. When we woke up and saw the time, we panicked because what about old Tom, he had to be taken out for his breakfast. I dressed the way I used to dress when I was late for school and ran out into the snow, Jimmy just ahead of me, but old Tom’s cabin was empty, the door ajar.

We turned and looked at each other. I remember we didn’t say a word, but ran together to the cabin marked ‘Office’ where there was a nice old lady behind a desk. ‘Good morning, dear,’ she said to me. ‘Your father’s gone up the road a piece, for breakfast. He’ll pick you up later.’

Jimmy was standing behind me in the doorway. He turned and ran out, then came back in. ‘The car’s gone,’ he said. ‘But, how could it be? I had the keys.’

And the old lady smiled. ‘You’re on your honeymoon, right?’ she said.

We nodded. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘your dad came and explained that, so I made an exception and let him into your cabin, oh, about eight o’clock, I reckon. You were sound asleep, the pair of you.’ She smiled and winked. ‘He just took the car keys off your dresser and went out again like Santy Claus. We reckoned you both needed your beauty sleep.’

Jimmy and I went outside. I remember to this day that I felt then the way I’d felt when I was a little girl and my ball hit and broke the window in McArdle’s Store and I ran away and an hour later they said a policeman was asking questions. I felt the same way that morning: I mean, too young to deal with this adult world we’d got mixed up in. We went back to our cabin and sat on the bed. Jimmy said old Tom would be back soon because his father had told Jimmy old Tom didn’t know how to handle money, therefore how would he be able to pay for his breakfast, so he’d realize he needed us and come back for us. But I didn’t believe Jimmy. I sat there thinking, look at us, we’re only married twenty-four hours and here we are sitting in this bedroom like two people married twenty years, worrying and worrying and he never even thought of kissing me this morning. I don’t think he even likes me, he just lusted after me, that was all. So we sat and talked and worried and then we walked up the road and got coffee and the people in the coffee shop didn’t remember seeing old Tom, so what else could we do, we were stranded, we went back to the motel and waited, it was awful, that wait, the morning was like weeks. At noon we made up our minds old Tom had ditched us, so we checked out and took a taxi into the town of Calais where Jimmy got his courage up and phoned the old father in Halifax. A servant answered and told Jimmy Mr Dawkins was on his way to Maine to pick up his son and Jimmy asked where old Tom had been found but the servant said he wasn’t allowed to answer any further questions. And that was that. We still had the expense money, we didn’t know what to do, we had some vague fear that my mother might have sent the Mounties after me and so, confused, like children, we decided to go back across the Canadian–American border and take a bus and go on to Toronto.

I remember the moment, as we walked towards the border point, that we saw the Chrysler Imperial. I wanted to run away, but Jimmy had hopes he might be able to square things with old Tom and the old father, so we went into the customs and there, sure enough, was old Tom. What had happened was he had no car papers, or even a driver’s licence, and at first they had booked him on suspicion of drunken driving, but after talking a bit to him they’d twigged what he was and searched him and found a card sewn into his jacket with the old father’s address and phone number. And it seemed they had phoned the old father and he was on his way in a private plane he had chartered. So, although Jimmy kept trying to get the immigration men to release old Tom into our custody, it was no soap and we were still there an hour later when the old father phoned to say he’d landed at the local airport and when the cops mentioned Jimmy, the old father said to hold him, he was a crook, and so when the cop put the phone down he told Jimmy he would have to detain him. Jimmy at once told me to go back across the border into Canada and wait for him there, but I refused and I stayed there with him until the old father showed up and there was all hell breaking loose, but once the old father got his money back from Jimmy, plus the car keys and the papers, the American cops, who were sensible men, said the father had no charge against Jimmy and let Jimmy and me go back across the border. And there we were. We stood on the Canadian side and as we stood there, waiting for a bus, the Chrysler Imperial drove past with old Tom sitting up front beside his daddy and, as Tom went by, he turned around in his homburg hat and his overcoat with the astrakhan collar and, so help me, he put his thumb to his nose and spread his fingers and gave us the raspberry.

We stood there in the snow, Jimmy and I, each of us with a suitcase, with that big murdering limousine splashing snowy slush on us as it went past, the old father sitting straight up behind the wheel and old Tom, thumb to his nose, his fat lips farting out a raspberry and at that moment I had the first real laugh of our married life. We just collapsed and embraced, and I remember thinking that maybe it had started so badly, we could only improve it and we’d make a go of it after all. We had forty-six dollars, enough to get us as far as Montreal if we ate only chocolate bars and chips, which we did, and then for a day and a night we didn’t eat at all while we sat around in Montreal waiting for answers to telegrams Jimmy had sent. (One to his older brother in New York, one to friend O’Keefe in Halifax.) At first we waited in the Greyhound Bus Terminal on Dorchester Street, but, after a Traveller’s Aid lady had asked me twice if I needed any help, we got nervous and moved to the waiting room in the Canadian Pacific Railway station on Windsor Street, where we snoozed away the night on benches and next morning went back to the Greyhound Bus Terminal to see if there were any replies to the telegrams. At noon, a telegram arrived from O’Keefe. He had wired sixty dollars which he said was his next week’s pay. ‘Good old O’Keefe,’ Jimmy yelled, hugging me, but I kept worrying how we would pay good old O’Keefe back.

And so we bought bus tickets and went on to Toronto where we spent our first night apart, me at the YWCA, Jimmy at the men’s ‘Y’. The next morning we met before breakfast and read the want ads in the paper, then separated and went off to look for temporary jobs. And, miracle, miracle, we were both hired in the first jobs we applied for. Jimmy got taken on as a packer, stuffing shoppers’ grocery bags at a checkout counter in a Loblaws’ supermarket, while I was engaged that same morning as a Christmas help trainee by the T. Eaton Company. At lunch time that same day, I slipped out of the big T. Eaton store on Yonge Street, where they were giving us the training course, and ran down the street to the Canadian National Telegraphs office and wired my mother, saying I’d come to Toronto, had a job at the T. Eaton Company and would write soonest, best love, don’t worry. Nothing about being married to Jimmy Phelan. That would have been much too risky. I was under age, she could bring me back to Butchersville, and I guessed she would, if she ever found out that Jimmy and I, both Catholics, had been married in a Unitarian minister’s office which doesn’t count in the Catholic religion, I mean if both parties are Catholics.

Anyway, after getting that wire away and easing my guilt a little, I went back to the T. Eaton Company and was shown how to make out a sales slip and told how T. Eaton had founded a great business and helped build up Canada because he was the first merchant in Canada to open a dry goods store with a strictly cash policy, but all through this I kept worrying about Mama, remembering how I had lied to her, and feeling depressed because Toronto wasn’t at all as I’d imagined it would be, not a bit like New York which I had been in for a long weekend when I was fifteen and not even as interesting as the part of Montreal we’d seen while we hung around the bus and railroad terminals there. And I worried about me and Jimmy and sex and so, by the end of the lecture on making out a sales slip, I was ready to weep and went into the T. Eaton washroom, all prepared for a good, self-pitying cry. But I never did cry. For there was another woman crying there in the washroom, another of the Christmas help trainees, although she was old enough to be my mother, and when I asked what was wrong she said it was so long since she’d been to school she didn’t understand the same as you, dear (meaning me), and she didn’t get the part of the lecture about crediting a charge and so would be fired and she and her husband were in debt, Household Finance had closed in, she and her family had had to change their addresses twice and now daren’t answer the door in case it was someone from a collection agency, her husband had developed an ulcer with the worry and if she didn’t get this job today and make some money to help out . . . And by this time she was becoming incoherent and I, frightened by this tale of people getting in debt and living close to the line (we’d already spent nearly all the money O’Keefe had lent us), told her to hold on, wait a minute, then went out and borrowed a sales book, sat down with her and went over and over the charge crediting procedure until I was sure she had it right. After which she kissed me and said God would reward me and if ever she could help me with anything I was just to ask her. Then we went to another lecture and I learned that T. Eaton worked hard all his life, harder than any of his employees, and was sometimes too tired to eat his supper at night and always put the customer first which we must do too. Then we went to the cafeteria for a cup of tea and the woman I had helped sat next to me and when I asked her what part of the city would be cheap to live in, she got a Toronto Star and went over the Room to Let ads with me. The one she circled was Blodgett’s and that was how we ended up, Jimmy and I, living with Harry and Mother.

 

‘God’s own country, kids,’ Harry bawls. ‘God’s own bloody country.’ We giggle. ‘Git up them stairs,’ Harry orders, smacking his wife’s bottom. She turns to us, woebegone. ‘He always wants that,’ she says. Again, we giggle. Harry gives us one of his large ‘double-intender’ winks, then lumbers upstairs after her, old and heavy in his darned brown cardigan and floppy mud-coloured slacks. Later, under the covers in our back bed-sitting room, Jimmy and I clutch each other, repeating these catch phrases, re-triggering our giggles. Our minds are full of Blodgett lore: we can close our eyes and see Harry in his favourite nook, scrunched down in his old cretonne-covered armchair, the chair planted foursquare in the bay window of his front parlour, his back to Gerrard Street, a case of Labatt’s India Pale Ale on the floor, within reach of his right hand, the wreckage of the Toronto Star and the Toronto Telegram strewn about his slippered feet. He has not moved out all weekend. Across the room, the television flitters fitfully. Mother rises to adjust the rabbit ears. Harry talks. He talks. From time to time, like a blind man, he gropes for and finds a new quart bottle of ale, reaches it up to the wall bottle opener without taking his eyes off the TV set, strikes the cap off, brings the foaming bottle top neatly to his lips. No drop is spilled.

‘Trouble with you kids, trouble with you, you’re like bloody belted earls, you are, born with a silver frigging spoon in your mouths because you was born here. Yes, here. In Canada. This bloody country, I tell you, this is democracy, God’s own bloody country, I say, and don’t tell me the States, don’t tell me the frigging Yanks are as good as we are, the frigging Yanks, I tell you I’ve been in Buffalo, I like people better, ha, ha, get it? That’s one of my double-intenders. I been in Buffalo, now Mother don’t give me them nasty looks, it’s just my way and a bit of fun never killed nobody.

‘Mary-Jimmy, did I ever tell you kids how I come here? I come to Canada with a football team. No, straight up. We was rank bloody amateurs too, but good enough to play the best they had over here which was not bloody much. Factory teams, mostly. Let’s see that’s – what is it, Mother? – must be thirty, no, that’s right, thirty-two years ago. Never mind, we got off the boat in Halifax, played there, then come on to Montreal, played a couple of matches there, then come on here. Toronto the Good. Second match we had here was with the Soap-O factory team and yours very truly kicked the only two goals and afterwards Mr Henry, he was general manager of Soap-O, a nice guy, he came up and offered me a job – just wanted me on his team, he said. So, our team – Sunderland Wanderers, we was – frigs off back to Blighty, God help them, poor sods – while I started at Soap-O sweeping floors – and I can hear you say, not much of a job, that, but, kids, I’ve not had one day’s regret. Right, Mother?’

‘Not one day’s regret,’ Mother says.

‘Seven months later, I sent for Mother, yes, her sitting over there, my bloody fiancey, and I sent full fare too, oh, yes and we was married right here, Bloor Street baptist, eh Mother? – and let me tell you, not one day’s regret about that neither. The Old Country, you hear some of these Old Country types here in Toronto going on about sodding England, don’t make me wet my drawers, I’m as English as any man and so is Mother and let me tell you kids the sun can bloody set on the whole sodding country, I said set, from Land’s End to John O’Groats and sink into the bloody Emerald sea – how’s that, what’s it, a jewel set in a something sea. Yes, and what’s the Old Country ever done for me, I ask you and I’ll give you my answer straight up – fuck all – sorry, Mary, sorry, Mother, but Canada, that’s another story, that’s my country now, I’d bloody die for old Canada, I would. It’s God’s bloody country, yes, God’s bloody country and don’t none of us forget it.’

Christmas was over. At Christmas time Jimmy and I deceived our respective families by announcing our ‘engagement’ then, courting the family seals of approval, went through a second marriage ceremony, this time in a Toronto Catholic church. My mother had to send written permission to the parish priest, which she did, but only after she’d written a letter warning me that in marrying the likes of Jimmy Phelan I was throwing my life away. Jimmy’s mother felt much the same way: her letter to Jimmy pointed out that he could now see where uncontrolled ‘passions’ led people: to a job packing shoppers’ bags in a supermarket. Jimmy still had his Loblaws’ job but I had been fired by the T. Eaton company right after the Christmas rush. Now, I had a job compiling a list of Toronto dentists for a firm which specialized in making up directories.

Yes, Christmas was over in God’s own country. Jimmy’s mother said I had ruined his life and my mother said he had ruined mine and we lay in bed giggling as we re-read the letters, camping up these doomsayings, but in the dark, afterwards, I would sometimes wonder how true these predictions were. We were married now, officially, by the One Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church, living in Toronto in God’s own country and the best we could do was make a combined salary of eighty-nine dollars a week and live on Gerrard Street with Harry and Mother Blodgett. Harry who believed the millennium was here because he was now supervisor of the night cleaning staff at Soap-O’s Etiobicoke factory, and Mother who gave thanks to her Redeemer for His eternal goodness in making her a chicken plucker at Kemelman’s Poultry in the St Lawrence Market. Yes, it was God’s own country for the Blodgetts with three square meals a day and lots of lovely beer and the mortgage half paid on their lovely home and we giggled as we heard all this and remembered it in bed, clinging to each other, trying to make believe that we were in love, a part of us sensing the rim of hysteria around the edge of our giggles, for Harry and Mother were not just comedy relief. There was another side to them, a side we saw sometimes on Sunday mornings, Harry, stupefied with beer, asleep in his armchair, snoring in concert with Mother, who lay dead drunk at his feet, her mouth open, her teeth slipping, great dead pigs, the pair of them in the cold winter sunlight of a Toronto Sunday morning, surrounded by empty beer bottles, the air rancid with stale cigarette smoke, while, facing them, across the room, the television test pattern, blue and constant, hummed ignored. And even Harry’s shout of ‘Git up them stairs’ had a sinister ring to me sometimes, as I sat in my cubby-hole office, compiling lists of registered dental surgeons, and imagined Harry rearing up like some old hippo over Mother and, Sweet Jesus our Saviour, if huge Harry and mountainous Mother could make it in bed, then what was wrong with Jimmy and me? Either Jimmy came before he was inside me or just after, and often I would feel so frantic I’d have to go into the bathroom later when he fell asleep, sit on the throne and finish it off. Afterwards, sometimes, I would cry. Was it me or was it him? He was so proud of the size of his penis, it had to be my fault, but what good was the size of his prick to me when I never got time to come? Was I frigid, was that it? He implied I was colder than he was and once suggested that perhaps our difficulty was that while he found me beautiful and couldn’t control himself with me, I didn’t find him attractive and so remained cold with him. But I knew that wasn’t true, his looks had nothing to do with it, I was cold to him all right, but cold because in some secret part of me I knew it had been a mistake to marry him. I had done a selfish rotten thing just because I wanted to get away to Toronto. But I was not prepared to pay the price for that mistake. I was not prepared to serve out a life sentence as Mrs James Phelan. The truth was, I was twenty, I didn’t want to live with anyone for a while, I wanted to be alone in my own room, to cook only when and if I felt like it, not to have to wash dishes or men’s socks, and the thought of having Jimmy’s baby, that was what brought on the real panic of those days. I saw myself becoming one of those drear, wan women who wander the supermarkets, aimlessly pushing wire shopping carts up and down the aisles of merchandise at three in the afternoon, their minds muzzy with Muzak while, up front on the shopping cart, some infant slobbered and peed in its snow suit and, farther up the aisle, its boily brother, aged three, noisily upset a soapflakes display. O diaphragm between me and all harm, I didn’t have you in those days. We knew I should go to a doctor but I was shy about it and so Jimmy went on using the french letters which were part of our trouble for he hated them and my worry was that he’d forgotten to put it on and so, in the dark, when he would start to take my pyjamas off, I’d interrupt him to ask, ‘Did you?’ which made him cross and spoiled things.

But I feared his sperm. A mistake would send me on that long supermarket wander while the Muzak played ‘Some Enchanted Evening’ and so there were no enchanted evenings or afternoons between Jimmy and me, no, not ever. And I dreamed of abortions. I didn’t believe I’d be able to go through with one. I suppose the last vestige of being a Catholic was the little part of me which saw it as murder and when I was not dreaming about abortions, sometimes I sat in gloom, thinking of what would happen if I did have a baby. I was sure it would mean post-natal depression. I had read an article about post-natal depression in Canada’s Own Magazine and I couldn’t get that article out of my mind. I read how some women get in such a state that they have to be locked up. In the article, a Canadian psychiatrist was quoted as saying it happened to women who secretly didn’t want babies, which was my case exactly. My abortion dreams changed to nightmares in which I killed the baby and flushed it down the toilet, nightmares so frightening and in which I did such horrible things that I’ve blanked them out for ever.

Anyway, all of this made me more afraid than ever of a mistake with Jimmy and so I was always making excuses, saying I was sleepy or sick or telling lies about my period, which made him think I was frigid and that, of course, made him resentful and it became more difficult for us to spend evenings together without passing snappish remarks and so, I suppose to avoid talking, we began spending a lot of evenings at the movies.

Strange that I decided, a while back, that we went to the movies because Jimmy was a mad movie fan. When now, examining that life of ours, wasn’t it I who drove us out all those nights?

And post-natal depression. Funny how long it is since I’ve thought of that. Or of Mackie.

Mackie, Mackie McIver. I can see her face more clearly than my mother’s. Her hair is reddish, her skin freckled: there is just a hint of red rims around the lids of her light-blue eyes. I wonder does she still wear those shirtwaist dresses, dresses with pleats which always made me think of the tennis dresses our mothers wore in the ’thirties? There she sits in her well of loneliness in the library at Canada’s Own Magazine, at her jumbled but ordered desk, the phone cradled against her shoulder as, in that light, clear, girlish voice, she tells some reader the size and population of Patagonia. Patient, tenacious, going back again and again to the files to hunt up some point. She did not give up. If ever she needs an epitaph, that sentence should be chiselled on the stone over her grave. She did not give up. Oh God, she did not give up.

Tall, I remember her as very tall. I wonder has any woman, will any woman remain as vividly in the retina of my memory? And yet, the first time I saw her I did not notice her at all until she made her amazing offer. I had been having the nightmares about flushing babies down toilets and was trying to think of a way to exorcize them, or at least exorcize that article on post-natal depression. But I didn’t have a copy of it any more and I decided to re-read it in hopes it hadn’t been as gloomy as I thought. So I phoned Canada’s Own Magazine and asked for a copy but they said it was too far back, impossible to let me have that issue, but if I came into their library I could copy it out.

Next day I went up to Canada’s Own in my lunch hour. I was directed to the library on the editorial floor where I asked for the article. The librarian was a woman and she sat me down at a desk with a nice reading light and it was very warm and quiet in there. When she brought the article, I felt foolish, as though I were there under false pretences, for I’d said something vague about wanting it for ‘research’. So I took out a piece of paper and made a couple of squiggly notes as I re-read the piece. A voice said, ‘Excuse me,’ and I looked up and it was the librarian. ‘I was just wondering, are you researching this piece for someone, or is it just a personal interest?’

Which made me blush, I remember, and also made me furious at her, but I saw that she was blushing too, then she said she didn’t mean to be nosey, it was just that she was short-staffed and was looking for a girl to help her in here. ‘And,’ she said, ‘you look like a researcher, you see.’

‘Well,’ I told her, ‘I am in a way. I work for a company which compiles directories and things. But I was just interested in this article for a friend of mine.’

‘Directories,’ she said. ‘Do you work for Lowry’s?’

I said I did. She smiled, triumphant. ‘Oh dear,’ she said. ‘They don’t pay at all well, do they?’

And then, sensing the murder rising in me, she added, very quickly, ‘I mean I used to work there myself once. I mean, I only said that because if you were at all interested in coming to work here, I’m sure we could pay more than they do. And you’d have more freedom. We’d pay – oh, let’s see, say sixty-five dollars a week. Would you be at all interested?’

Well, of course I was interested: it meant a twenty-dollar raise and besides it seemed more prestigious to work for a magazine. So I said, ‘Yes, I suppose I am.’

‘Oh great.’ (One of the things I remember best about her after all these years is the funny high whinny she gave when something really pleased her.) She gave it now and said, ‘Of course I’ll have to speak to the editor. I’m not sure if he’s back from lunch.’

I said, ‘But there’s no hurry. I could come in tomorrow, or any day that suits you.’

‘No, no,’ she said. She smiled. ‘You might change your mind. Now, you just wait here, will you, please?’

She ran to her desk, grabbed up some sort of accounts book, and ran out. While I sat there at the reading desk, bemused, not really believing this was happening to me. Until, after what seemed an awfully long time, back she came, very jumpy, very eager. She asked me to come with her.

And so I walked into my first meeting with the Warm Brown Turd, R. J. McKinnon who now, improbably, has been chosen to write the foreword to Hat’s one and only book. I remember I felt dazed, as a prisoner might when led into the glare and confusion of a courtroom, for there were very bright overhead lights in McKinnon’s office and, off by one wall, two teletype machines mysteriously typing out stuff on their own, which was something I had never seen before and found distracting. There were two phones on his desk and he kept being interrupted by one or the other of them ringing, and the librarian lady (I mean Mackie, which was the name I gave her, perhaps to pay her back for the name she insisted on giving me), anyway, Mackie, Miss Ruth McIver, the librarian lady as I said, kept talking at McKinnon, talking very fast in her high schoolgirlish voice while he half listened and looked at my legs, and then, after a perfunctory question about my schooling, he quickly ascertained that I was married, that I had no library training and had been only a few weeks in my current job and just as I was deciding that I had failed his examination and that, as soon as he finished a conversation on the phone which had interrupted him, he would tell me he didn’t think I was quite what they had in mind, he said to the person on the phone, ‘Okay. Go to hell,’ slammed the phone down, stared up at me, and sighed in an ‘I-give-up’ manner. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Ruth, here, seems to think she can use you. I suppose it’s up to her. I can give you fifty dollars a week, okay?’

‘Sixty-five,’ she said sharply. McKinnon looked at her and there was, I remember, a warlike sort of pause. ‘Sixty,’ he said. ‘Take it or leave it.’ He looked at her, not at me. ‘She has no experience,’ he said.

Mackie (Miss McIver, the librarian lady) looked at me, alarmed. I said, thank you, sixty would be all right. Then I said I supposed I’d have to give a week’s notice in my other job and I remember McKinnon nodded and suddenly came up to me and shook my hand, saying, ‘Well you’d better arrange the starting date with Ruth here. Good luck.’ And that she thanked him, very gushily, then took my arm and walked me down a long corridor of editorial offices, going back to the library, and squeezed my arm and said, ‘Oh, boy. Wasn’t that something? I mean, really something. I’m delighted, delighted. Aren’t you?’

I must have looked confused for she at once put on her stricken face again and said, ‘Look, is it the five dollars, for if it is, remember, I promised it to you and you’re entitled to it and I’ll give it to you myself, all right? It’s worth it to me to have you, honestly, it is.’

‘But that’s not necessary,’ I told her. ‘Sixty is fine, it’s more than I’m getting now.’

She stared at me there in the corridor, her eyes widening, then mysteriously filling with tears. She bent forward and her lips touched my cheek. ‘You are a dear,’ she said, blushing, blushing. ‘Can I ask you a very big favour?’

I said, ‘Yes, what?’ and then she said, ‘I’d like to call you Maria. Is that all right?’

I said, ‘Yes, it’s all right. But why?’

‘Because you are a Maria and not a Mary. I hope you won’t be offended but Mary is stodgy and you’re not stodgy, you’re . . . well, you’re just Maria, that’s all. Do you mind?’

I thought at the time it was sweet of her. I thought her an extraordinary woman, hiring me on the spur of the moment, and if she wanted to call me Maria, why not? But now, thinking back to that time, I realize no man ever tried to change me as much as Mackie did, no man tried so ruthlessly to suppress the Mary Dunne I was in order to transform me into a creature of his imaginings. It took a woman to do that, it took Ruth McIver whom I called Mackie and who was Miss Mouse to most of the people on the editorial floor, Miss Mouse, perennial spinster, the sort of woman who wasn’t kissed even at the annual office party. But behind the façade of Miss Mouse was a Caesar of determination. Once she had decided I was Maria, she never called me anything else.

 

So I became Maria, Miss McIver’s assistant in the library at Canada’s Own Magazine. It was as though she had decided to destroy my old identity by inventing a new one for me. Oh, I know. That sounds Machiavellian, when the truth is my relationship with Mackie was probably a simple little Mammon fable, a story of my greed. Certainly, it was the one time in my life when I was corrupted by someone’s money. Poor Mackie, I’m being hard on her, she meant well. Yet when I think back to those times, to Jimmy and Mackie and me sitting down to dinner in her big house on Prince Arthur, I feel no auld lang syne.

Days, I was Mackie’s Maria. Each night I went back to the Blodgetts’ and our bed-sitting room where I was Mrs James Phelan who badgered Jimmy into writing to his parents and to Dalhousie University so that something could be arranged and he could finish school at the University of Toronto, instead of spending the rest of his life as a packer at Loblaws’. And something was arranged. His parents sent what money they could afford, but the fees were higher in Toronto and everything they sent him went for books, tuition, and transportation. Jimmy quit Loblaws’, went to classes, and we lived on my salary. Dinners of Campbell’s soup and a tin of Heinz spaghetti. No cigarettes, no movies, no new clothes. Nothing. When I look back on those months they seem to have been a softening-up process designed to make us ripe for corruption. And yet, I, not Jimmy, was the one who wanted to resist it. I remember saying to him, at the very beginning, if there’s one thing I don’t want it’s for Miss McIver to know how poor we are. Why not, he said, it’s nothing to be ashamed of? Please, Jimmy, I said, I have to work with her, she’s one of those Lady Bountiful people, I don’t want any favours from her, do you understand? We were going to dinner at her house on Prince Arthur when I said it. I remember it was the first time we’d been invited there, it was our first evening out in ages. In those days, I spent most evenings sitting in the Blodgetts’ parlour, staring at television with Harry and Mother so that Jimmy would have the bed-sitting room to himself for studying. The gay life.

I remember how impressed we were, that first night at Mackie’s house. There was the house itself. Then she let slip that her father had owned a biscuit factory. Her mother died when she was twelve, leaving her an only child, daddy’s girl, living in that big house with her father until his death the summer before she met us. When dinner was served, it was brought in by a uniformed maid and the meal was standing rib roast with a bottle of wine, a trifle for dessert, and brandy with the coffee and you can imagine that after our months on Heinz and Campbell’s we fell on that food like the starving Asian masses, and Jimmy got high on the wine and two glasses of brandy and started answering all her questions, telling her about his life at the university, how he had gone back to school, how he felt like a struggling married adult among a bunch of feckless kids and, before I could stop him, he had blabbed our situation, how we lived on my salary, our lack of money, everything. Mackie refilled his glass, sucked in every word and, before we left, insisted on showing us over the house, leading us into unused bedrooms, pointing out that her father’s study was going to waste, saying how she was afraid of living alone ever since her father had passed away and how she had nightmares, how she wished she had someone else to stay with her besides the maid who was deaf and no use in an emergency. She let that idea lie with us, then invited us back to dinner again, ten days later, and this time she showed Jimmy a car which had belonged to her father, which she never drove, saying maybe he would like to use it to get to the university and then (bringing it out as if she’d just thought of it) saying how wonderful it would be if we moved in with her, we could use the rooms and the car and Jimmy could drop us women off each morning at Canada’s Own, then use the car himself for the rest of the day at university, then, perhaps, pick us up and drive us home in the evenings? Or would that be too much trouble for him?

Well, I looked at him and saw his mouth opening to say no trouble, he’d be delighted, so I cut in and said that it was very kind of her but we’d made an arrangement with the Blodgetts, we were more or less committed to it, etcetera. Anyway, I backed us out of it and, I remember, going home on the bus afterwards, Jimmy and I had a terrible fight in which I accused him of leeching off people, which was the worst possible thing I could say as he was touchy then about living off my salary. Which produced one of his deep sulks, so by the time we got home we weren’t speaking.

But next day, at work, Mackie went back to the attack, starting in on me all over again. And when I said no, she waited two days, then phoned the Blodgett house at a time when she guessed I’d be out and, under pretence of asking for me, repeated her offer to Jimmy, saying she wished he could make me change my mind, she really needed someone to stay there with her, her nightmares were getting worse, we really would be doing her a favour, etcetera. So Jimmy promised to talk to me again and did and he and I had a second row, an awful one in which the unhappiness of our life in and out of bed settled down on us and I cried and after we’d made up, I said all right, we’d go to Mackie’s, if that was what he wanted.

I see that I make it sound as though I didn’t want to go, but of course it’s not so simple as that. I had never been really poor before and living on top of each other in a place like the Blodgetts’ was, I thought, part of the reason we fought so much. On the other hand I had never been as rich as Mackie, and the part of me that likes luxury saw myself living in that house on Prince Arthur with maids cooking dinner and making our beds and, after Butchersville (after any small town), city life seemed grand. So, it’s not fair for me now, as it wasn’t fair then, to put all the blame on Jimmy. This is a story of how I lost part of my innocence, lost part of that Mary Dunne who left Butchersville and never can go back. It is a story of what money did to me. If I am to learn anything from past mistakes, then there’s no sense blaming it all on Jimmy.

At the end of that week, Jimmy broke the news to the Blodgetts and I told Mackie we would come. I remember that Jimmy went over to Prince Arthur and warmed up Mackie’s father’s big Buick and he and Mackie drove back to Gerrard Street to pick me up and install me in our new home. It was Saturday afternoon. The bags were all stacked up in the front hall and when the car arrived, Harry and Mother came out of their parlour, looking very solemn, and invited us all in, Jimmy and me and the lady who was stealing their lodgers away. Then, in a gesture as grand as declaring a national day of mourning, Harry turned off the television set. He produced a specially purchased bottle of gin (for he thought I’d said I liked gin), poured great glassfuls for me, Mackie, Mother, Jimmy, and himself, and made a little speech, saying that Mother and he would be thinking of us, they wished us all the very best of luck and every happiness, a family of our own (Jimmy and I avoiding each other’s eye at this), long life and cheers, down the hatch, God bless. Then Mother and Harry both came to peck my cheek and shake hands with Jimmy and the lady we were going to live with, presenting us with the rest of the gin as a going-away present, making us promise that we’d come and see them very soon.

But we did not go to see them, not soon, not ever. The following Christmas we got a card from them, a Jolly Santa and his Reindeer: ‘Wishing you all the very best, thinking of you, hoping to see you soon, Harry & Mother.’ We meant to send them a card but we forgot.

The next year there was another Christmas card. Jesus the Shepherd surrounded by Dear Little Lambs: ‘Wishing you all the very best, Violet Blodgett. P.S. Harry passed away last August 31st.’ I never knew her name was Violet. We had not written or phoned or called or even sent a lousy card. We were young: we had our troubles. If there is a hell it should be for selfishness.

But we had our troubles: we were full of them. I kept telling Jimmy the one thing we mustn’t do with Mackie is take things we can’t afford to pay back, so for goodness sake don’t drink her liquor, you had two drinks last night and two the night before, you can’t make a regular thing of it and who’s paying for the gas in that car, not you, you fill up the tank at Bolst’s and charge it to her account, don’t you? Don’t you?

He said, ‘Have you ever listened to yourself, Mary? You’re not even twenty-one yet and you nag like my mother, nag, nag, nag, now shut up, will you?’

I said, ‘Look, I don’t want to be beholden to her, that’s all.’ ‘Well, we are beholden,’ he said, ‘so relax. She has pots of money, she doesn’t know what to do with it. If it pleases her to act the fairy godmother to the pair of us, well then, good for her, I say. Let’s sit back and enjoy it.’

I looked at him and wondered how I could have married him. I’d thought he was like me, but he wasn’t, I didn’t know him at all. When you came right down to it he had no morals, none at all. I’d made a mess of my life, an awful damn mess. Oh, Jimmy, please, I thought, please have some independence, don’t always take things, please, Jimmy, please, I want to love you, I do, I do.

But I did not love him. And he went right on taking things from Mackie, defiant, like a child making a noise after it’s been ordered to stop. And yet while I was righteously blaming Jimmy, wasn’t I just as bad, wasn’t I also eating Mackie’s food which our miserable rent couldn’t even begin to pay for, wasn’t I living in her house, riding in her car, and, worse, didn’t I know very well I was the one she wanted to please, everything she did for Jimmy she really did for me? And what did that make me but a person with absolutely no morals at all? Because I knew what it was all about, I sensed it almost from the start, I just wouldn’t face up to it. I mean, after that thing about my birthday. It was obvious.

Let’s see. I went to work on Canada’s Own Magazine, I think it was the second week of February. My birthday is the seventeenth of March, St Patrick’s Day. And that year it was my twenty-first birthday. But I did not want a celebration at Prince Arthur Avenue. So I said nothing to Jimmy, he wasn’t one for dates, I knew he wouldn’t think of it. A few days before the seventeenth, a present came from my mother and one from Dick and Meg. And, I remember, a present from my Aunt Martha. Anyway, I put them aside and said nothing about them, planning to open them myself, quietly, on the day.

On the morning of the seventeenth, I got up early and opened my presents in the bathroom. My mother had sent me a wristwatch. I forget what the other presents were. I remember I wanted to wear the wristwatch at once, but it would be noticed, so I put it in my handbag and decided to keep it there until the end of the week when the birthday would be safely over. Then I went down to breakfast, and sure enough, no word from Jimmy about what day it was. He didn’t even say it was St Patrick’s Day.

After work that evening Jimmy came around with the Buick as per usual and drove Mackie and me home. Still no word about the birthday. I remember I went upstairs, took a bath, and changed, and when I went down to the living-room there was nobody there. The lights were out. Which was peculiar. I thought a fuse had blown, or maybe a bulb, and so went into the room by the light of the fire and was going towards the big trilight lamp to check when, suddenly, the piano started playing in the next room and Gert, the maid, opened the sliding doors into the dining-room and there was Mackie sitting up very straight at the upright piano, playing ‘Happy Birthday to You’, and Jimmy standing by the piano singing it and the maid singing it, and on the dining-room table was a bottle of fizzy wine that Mackie was mad for, Asti Spumante, and what were, obviously, presents.

‘How did you know it was my birthday?’ I blurted out, looking at both Jimmy and Mackie as I said it.

‘You can thank her,’ Jimmy said. ‘You know me and dates.’ While Mackie smiled and came forward. ‘I’m the librarian, remember?’ she said. ‘I keep records.’ She kissed me, first on the left cheek, then on the right, like a French general, saying, ‘Many happy returns, my dear.’ And Gert, the maid, said, ‘Happy birthday, Miss Maria,’ and Jimmy came up and grabbed me and kissed me (sticking his tongue between my lips as usual). I heard the fizzy wine pop and at that moment I was glad they’d remembered. I wanted a celebration. I was twenty-one at last.

Then, the presents. There was a box of Laura Secord candies from Jimmy, which was just right: it was what we could afford and they were chocolate-covered almonds, my favourites. Gert had made me two things: a gingerbread man with red icing buttons and a pair of red wool mitts to wear with my winter coat. The third present, the one from Mackie, wasn’t as embarrassing as I was afraid it might be. It was a little gold bracelet, very thin, not too expensive, I hoped.

Anyway, something I felt I could accept. So I put it on and tried the mitts on and opened the candies and held my glass of wine, tears, happy tears in my eyes as Jimmy, Gert, and Mackie drank a toast to my majority.

And then Mackie gave me the envelope. ‘And this,’ she said, ‘is something extra.’ I remember I felt afraid and didn’t want to take it, I tried to hand it back to her, saying no, really, we were embarrassed, Jimmy and I, she’d been far too good to us already, isn’t that so, Jimmy? and Jimmy agreeing, but with no determination (the rat), and of course nothing would do Mackie but that I opened the envelope. There was a letter inside. It went something like this:

 

Mr Gil Cameron,

Canada’s Own Magazine,

Toronto

 

Dear Gil,

This is to acknowledge receipt of Miss McIver’s cheque for $200.00 tuition fees for Maria Phelan.

As you know, I have a high regard for your opinions on acting potential, but I am sure you will also understand that I cannot accept Miss Phelan as a member of my evening class without first going through my usual interview procedures. If you will have Miss Phelan call me, I will set up such an interview as quickly as possible.

With warmest personal regards,

Catherine Mosca

 

Catherine Mosca’s acting class was the reason I had wanted to come to Toronto in the first place. She was one of the founders of the New Theatre Group in New York and her class is the only good professional one in Canada. Back in Butchersville I had daydreamed that if I ever got to Toronto, I would work at any job and save every penny and as soon as I had part of the tuition fee saved up, I would apply for one of her ‘interviews’. Of course when we did get to Toronto, there was the guilt about Jimmy’s career, so when he went back to school, I’d put my plans off for a year until, hopefully, he’d graduate and be able to support me. And now here I was, staring at a letter in which the fees were paid and the interview arranged and it should have been like winning the Irish Sweepstakes. Instead, I thought of what had happened a few weeks back.

We were in the Canada’s Own cafeteria when Mackie introduced me to Gil Cameron, the magazine’s drama critic. I was twenty, I was stage-struck, I was excited to meet someone who knew the real stage and I remember I blurted out some question about did he know Catherine Mosca and he was nice to me, very gentle and said yes, why? and so I told him all about my ambition to come here, save my money, and get into one of Catherine Mosca’s classes and how I’d won first prize at the Dominion Drama Festival in Halifax and on and on. I blush, I blush, why didn’t I shut up?

Afterwards, I felt silly and said so to Mackie. I remember she asked if Miss Mosca gave evening classes and I said I had no idea, I didn’t imagine so. And that was all, I forgot it. Until this letter. Looking back now, I see that if I’d had the drive, the self-love, the hardness it takes for success, I would have gone over and kissed Mackie and thanked her for giving me this start. But, instead, I was filled with shame and hate, I saw her plotting it all behind my back, getting poor Gil Cameron to lie about my ‘acting potential’, phoning Miss Mosca to inquire about evening classes, writing out her cheque, then getting Gil Cameron to send it on with a ‘personal’ letter.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I can’t take it.’

I put the letter down on the table, picked up my glass, and tried to drink the fizzy wine. ‘Now, Maria, that’s nonsense,’ Mackie said. ‘We won’t let you do it, will we, Jimmy? It’s not even a present, it’s a – well, call it a loan from me to you until you get on your acting feet. You can pay it back some day. Oh, Maria, don’t you see? We know you have it in you, we all do. Just take it and enjoy it, for our sakes.’

‘I can’t.’

‘But why, dear, why?’

How could I tell her, how could I tell her I felt betrayed? I had blurted out my secrets in public and so strangers had been going around involving themselves in my private dreams. Didn’t she realize that now I could never go to Catherine Mosca and apply in an honest, ordinary way? I felt like crying, I felt it’s my twenty-first birthday and I’m supposed to be an adult today but I don’t feel grown up, I feel ten years old. They’ve spoiled everything. I put the glass down, said ‘Excuse me’, and turned to run upstairs to my room and, as I did, I saw the most unforgivable thing: Mackie putting up her hand to make Jimmy and the maid stay where they were, smug old Mackie ‘taking over’. Not this time you don’t, I thought. Not this time, damn you. I ran upstairs like a mad thing and locked the bedroom door.

Her voice. I can hear it still.

‘Maria?’

‘Maria, won’t you come and have some supper? Gert’s made you a birthday cake.’

‘Look, Maria, those classes aren’t a gift, you can pay me back. I promise.’

‘Maria, I was only trying to help. We’re all very glum downstairs. We need you.’

‘Maria, I apologize. I know now it was nosey of me and I shouldn’t have done it. But I didn’t realize that it was going to offend you. I am very fond of you.’

Then he came up.

‘Mary, for God’s sake.’

‘Mary? Oh, come off it.’

He began to sing:

 

‘Happy birthday to you,

Happy birthday to you,

Happy birthday, dear Sulky,

Happy birthday to you.’

 

That didn’t work either. He went down and, I guess, ate his dinner. But she came right up again.

‘Maria, I’ve been thinking. I’ll get Gil to write tomorrow and say there’s been a mistake, you’re not ready to apply yet. Okay?’

‘Okay,’ I said.

‘Good. Now, come on down and have some supper.’

‘No.’

I know. It was childish of me, but dammit. Later, it seemed much later, he knocked and asked if he could come in. Mackie had gone to bed, he said, and he was tired and wanted to go to bed too.

I called out. ‘Look, just this once would you mind sleeping on the couch in the study?’

‘Okay,’ he said.

He went away. It was the first time we’d slept apart since that third night of our marriage when I slept at the YW and he at the YM. Maybe that, our sleeping apart, was the worst thing I did that evening. For I set a precedent.

But, no, sending him off to sleep alone wasn’t the worst part of it, the worst part was that, hours later, in the middle of the night, I got up, went down to the living-room and there, sure enough, was the letter from Catherine Mosca, sitting in the letters tray on the sideboard. I read the letter. I read it twice. And the worst part, the very worst, the most despicable part of all was that next morning I apologized. Mackie and I made up and, so much for my independence, a week later her cheque had been cashed, I had passed my interview and was enrolled in Catherine Mosca’s evening class.

 

Yet if I had not worked hard in acting class, I might still believe I was born to be an actress. ‘A so-called actress,’ as Ernie said tonight, his voice thick with that hatred of actors you find in so many people. Of course, Ernie doesn’t just hate actors, he hates me in particular. Funny, I haven’t thought of him since he left. Despite all that happened tonight, I did manage to excise him from my mind. Perhaps the truth about Ernie is that he does not stay in anyone’s mind. He did not even stay in my mind before tonight, yet how could I have forgotten some of those things which happened.

I wish I had remembered him. I wish I’d had some warning feeling when I first saw L. O. MACDUFF scribbled on the doorman’s pad. But, of course, as with everything else about Ernie, the L.O. MacDuff thing is not something one would remember. Only Ernie would remember it.

It was about half an hour after I tried to reach Mama in Butchersville that the phone rang again. Terence always answers the phone when he’s home. But, after a moment, I heard him call out from his study.

‘For you, Mary.’

When I picked up the receiver in the living-room, I could hear Beau’s and Sam’s voices in the background. Then Terence, hearing me on the extension, hung up and all at once there was a strange heavy silence on the other end of the line.

‘Hello?’ I said.

‘Mary?’ (A man’s voice.)

‘Who is it?’

‘It’s me.’

‘I’m sorry. Who?’

‘L.O. MacDuff. Didn’t you get my message?’

‘Oh, yes,’ I said, vaguely. ‘But, I’m afraid, I, well, I have an awful memory for names.’

‘Oh, come off it, Mary,’ he said. ‘It’s Ernie Truelove. Don’t you remember the nickname you gave me?’

‘God,’ I said. ‘Hello, Ernie.’

‘You did remember,’ he said. ‘You were just teasing, weren’t you?’

‘Are you here on a vacation?’ I asked him, wanting to get off this name thing.

‘Just a few days. I’m supposed to go back to Montreal tomorrow morning. That’s why I phoned you. I – ah – I wondered if – ah – if you and your husband would care to join me for a drink tonight? My last night and all that. I’d like to kind of celebrate with someone I know. And, well, you’re the only person I know here. Apart from the fact that you’re the person I’d most want to see, even if I did know other people.’

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Well, yes, but I’ll have to check with Terence, all right?’

‘Look,’ he said. ‘If you’re busy, I mean if you have another engagement, I understand, of course. I know you must be mixed up with all sorts of interesting people, I mean being married to Terence Lavery and all. Look –’ (his voice grew loud, hurting my ear) ‘– I mean, don’t be shy, tell me, forget it, just thought I’d call, that’s all.’

Now it was my turn to get loud and flustered. ‘No, listen,’ I said, ‘I just wanted to check with Terence –’

‘No, be frank,’ he interrupted. ‘Look, we’re old friends.’

‘I was going to suggest,’ I said, ‘that perhaps you’d like to come and have supper with us. Just pot luck.’

‘Oh, but I couldn’t put you to that trouble. I mean I didn’t phone for that. I wanted to invite you.’

‘It’s no trouble,’ I said. ‘We’d love to see you.’

‘Great.’ He did sound delighted. ‘I’m a fan of your husband’s, you know. Look – can I bring a bottle or something?’

‘No, just yourself,’ I said. ‘Is seven all right?’

‘Any time,’ he said. ‘Seven will be fine. By the way –’ (a long pause, then he went on) ‘– you – ah – you know that Hat was living at my place when he died?’

‘No, I didn’t,’ I said and just then I sensed he was going to say something I didn’t want to hear.

‘Well, he was. He used to talk a lot about you, Mary. I mean – well, you know he was in love with you right up to the end.’

‘Oh?’ I said. (What could I say?)

‘Yes, well I just thought I’d tell you, I mean, no matter what he may have told you or written you, he did love you. I just mentioned it because there mightn’t be a chance tonight, I mean with your new husband there and all.’

‘Thank you. I’ll see you at seven then, Ernie.’

‘Seven,’ he said. ‘Gosh I’m looking forward to it, Mary.’

‘So am I. See you then.’

‘I’ll be there,’ he said. ‘Lay on, MacDuff.’

He hung up. I remember thinking, that’s it, lay on, MacDuff, was his slogan, he used it all the time. I remember thinking, I hope he doesn’t bore the pants off Tee and then, the thing he’d said, the thing I didn’t want to think about, came into my mind and angered me all over again against Hat. I could just see him sitting in Ernie Truelove’s place in Montreal, a Scotch in his fist, his wild black eyes fixed on his audience as he dramatized how he felt about me, how he loved me, how, goddammit, he would always love me because, do you see, Ernie, Mary was the woman I really loved, she was the love of my life. And then, obliquely (or perhaps not so obliquely), the old hint of suicide, the last emotional stop pulled out to ensure that Ernie would not leave him alone. For, total actor that Hat was, the suicide threat meant the audience would rally around. Oh, how could I have wept for him so many times since I heard of his death?

I hung up the phone and thought why have I invited Ernie Truelove to supper? Why have I left myself open for another evening of reminiscence about Hat?

I was shaking. Adrenalin or fear, I don’t know, but at that moment I willed Terence to appear and, as though by magic, he did appear coming by the living-room, showing Beau and Sam to the front door.

‘ ’Bye there, Martha,’ Sam told me.

‘ ’Bye, honey,’ said Beau.

They were putting on their coats in the hall. Both, I noticed, wore grey desert boots. Sam had a green bulky knit sweater and Beau a maroon Swiss velour shirt. Both had purchased flat British cloth caps. Beau’s face is very fat and the cap, when he put it on, looked like a lid on a kitchen pot. And Sam, well, Sam was simply too old for fancy dress.

‘Be talking to you,’ Beau assured Terence.

‘Yeah, we’ll be in touch,’ Sam decided.

‘Ciao,’ said Terence, closing the door on them, waving them a farewell, then turning, coming to me, smiling, his arms out to hold me and I rushed into his arms and held him tight, for in his embrace my fears went. I held and was held and was safe. I put my face against the lapel of his tweed jacket and rubbed like a cat.

‘Well, now, Martha,’ Tee said. We laughed. ‘Yes, indeed,’ Tee said. ‘They don’t know your name.’

‘Who does?’ I asked. ‘Sometimes I forget myself.’

‘Who’s L.O. MacDuff?’ Tee asked, suddenly holding me off and looking at me. ‘Some old love?’

‘No, no. But he’s coming to supper. I’m sorry I couldn’t get out of it, I’ll tell you about it. Want some tea?’

‘Okay. And let’s go into my room and goof and gossip a minute.’

Tee turned me towards his study and asked, ‘Good day?’ and, without thinking, I said, ‘No, no, I’ve had an awful day, it started badly, it was just one thing –’ (and then stopped myself, remembering that, nowadays, I always seem to be complaining. I seem neurotic, self-centred, always talking trivia, I don’t know how he can still like me) ‘I mean,’ I said, changing tack, ‘I had a strange sort of day. I had lunch with Janice Sloane and that was very odd, I can tell you.’

‘Odd?’ he said.

‘It would take ages even to give you the gist of it. But one thing came out. Remember we used to wonder who it was told Hat about you and me? Well, it was Janice.’

But Tee wasn’t interested in that, that’s the past and he never thinks of the past. He kissed the nape of my neck. ‘L.O. MacDuff,’ he said. ‘Our mysterious dinner guest, he’s the one I want to hear about. I bet he’s an old boyfriend.’

‘Nonsense,’ I said, but as I said it I remembered that Ernie had taken me to dinner a few times and a memory came of one night, vague, for I was high, when Ernie wept. That was all I remembered then, it was just a pinprick, I put it out of my mind. ‘Wait till you hear,’ I said to Tee. ‘Know what his real name is? It’s Ernest Truelove.’

‘No wonder he changed it to MacDuff. Martha, you have to be joking?’

‘Stop calling me Martha,’ I said. ‘I’ll begin to think it’s my real name.’ We were in the kitchen now. I put water in the kettle and decided to tell Tee about that strange thing of forgetting who I was in the beauty parlour this morning, but ‘Teabags or tea?’ he asked and I said teabags would do, and he went into the pantry out of earshot to get the teabags. When he came back, I had begun to feel trembly again, and, when I spoke, my voice was shaky. ‘I mean,’ I said, ‘about names. It’s strange, it’s been such a funny day about names, it started this morning when the woman in the hairdresser’s asked my name and I forgot, I couldn’t remember, I just blanked out for a moment. It was like that time long ago – I think I told you about – in Juarez, a real panic –’

But Tee came to me and held me, pressing me to him. ‘Now, now, take it easy,’ he said. ‘Don’t get upset.’

‘And then when I did remember, I remembered my name as Phelan,’ I said. ‘Which was really depressing.’

When I said depressing, Terence’s eyes went neutral. Sometimes, I think he thinks there’s something wrong with me, something mental. ‘Oh come on,’ he said. ‘It’s just your time of month.’

But, as he said it, he looked at me with a sort of questioning look, and I thought to myself, he thinks I’m mad, he does. My hand shook as I poured hot water into the teapot. I tried to sound light, and casual.

‘It was funny that thing about my name,’ I said. ‘I mean, really. Who am I any more? All these names, who am I?’

‘You are May-ree, May-ree,’ he sang, ‘and it’s a grand O-o-ld N-a-a-me.’

‘Wrong. Ask Sam. My first name is now Martha.’

He laughed and, if I had left it at that, it would have been fine, it would all have passed off as a joke. But when I am nervous I am incapable of leaving things alone, I go on about them and so, I did go on and said, ‘But seriously, Dunne, Phelan, Bell, Lavery – just think if it were you, would you remember? I mean is it any wonder I can’t remember my name now, when somebody asks me?’

He picked up the tray. ‘At least you’re not L.O. MacDuff, yclept Ernest Trueblood. Let’s take the tea into my room.’

‘Truelove,’ I told him.

‘That’s better,’ he said. ‘And was he a true love?’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘I mean he sounded like some old boyfriend of yours. Is he?’

‘Of course he’s not. You think every man I meet is one of my old boyfriends.’

‘Sorry,’ Tee said. ‘You take the teapot, okay?’

‘All right,’ I said, starting off down the hall. ‘I suppose he was a “boyfriend”, as you call it. I mean I went out with him a few times.’

‘In Montreal?’

‘Yes. After Jimmy and I broke up. Hat was in Europe and it looked as though his wife wouldn’t give him a divorce. Ernie worked in our office. He asked me out to dinner a few times and I was lonely and went.’

Terence pushed open the door to his room and put the teacups on his long work table. ‘Well, it’s funny. When I told him I’d get you to call him back he said he’d wait in his room for the call. I said there was no need for him to do that. Then he got all upset. He said, “No, no, you don’t understand, it’s important to me to see her, very important.” So I said, “All right, but I’m sorry I didn’t get your name?” and he sort of hesitated and then he said, “Well, if you tell her L.O. MacDuff, she’ll know who you mean.” Which I thought was an odd thing for him to say.’

‘It was a nickname I gave him. He was always saying “Lead on, MacDuff”.’

‘I thought it was lay on,’ Tee said. ‘Lay on, MacDuff, isn’t that what Macbeth says?’

On the wall of his study Terence has huge prints and photographs of the great men he admires. I looked at the wall, staring at those famous faces, thinking maybe Terence does not believe me, maybe he thinks I was promiscuous before I met him. I have Hat to thank for that lie about being promiscuous, it’s the sort of thing, once a man says it, other men believe him.

From the wall, Dostoyevsky, bearded like a Bible elder, stared down at me in contempt. Above him, in an early photograph, Proust saw through me with calm ellipsoid orbs. Yeats, in Augustus John’s portrait, ignored me to contemplate some pure beauty I would never be. All were men, all men judged me, all men were unfair, as Hat was unfair, and in my mindless tension it seemed to me that Terence was accusing me of having an affair with silly Ernie Truelove and, worse, somewhere in the back of the panic of my mind there was the memory of Ernie weeping. I could not remember why or when but there, staring at and stared at by those great and famous men, I was again guilty of something, I knew not what, but guilty, yes, guilty. Self-condemned.

Ernie weeping, why could I not remember why or when it was, what had happened to my memory? I stared at the wall as Terence poured cups of tea. Dostoyevsky, Proust, Tolstoy, Yeats. They knew who they were and, because they did, we, posterity, will always know. They wrote, therefore they are, whereas I, sitting glum on that sofa, was nameless, lost, filled with a shameful panic. I looked at Proust, the flâneur, who renounced his world for his work. I thought of his death, the great book finished after fifteen years, the last pages of corrections lying on the invalid’s sick-bed. And as I stared at Proust’s strange eyes, some self-defence within me rose up to shift the intolerable burden of blame and I thought to myself why did Terence put these great men on his wall, Terence who is so quick to judge me promiscuous, isn’t Terence afraid of being judged himself? My God, when I think of it, the arrogance of a man who could do the trivial work he does under the scrutiny of the likes of Tolstoy and Yeats. Proust gave up a world for his work. Terence wouldn’t even give up a party.

And then, as though he guessed at my sudden anger towards him, Tee got up, and put a Chopin record on the record player. No one has known my moods as he does and he was right, music was the best thing then. In my emotional state, music could bring tears, but tears lull me, whereas, as he knew, further talking would lead to my finding some pretence to pick a fight with him.

I stared again at the bearded elders, heard Brailowsky begin a mazurka, tried to think of the clear water sound of the music but it was Down Tilt. I was on the cliff edge and I knew it, on the edge of that state of mind where I will blame myself for anything, a state of mind where the world is not at fault, but I am at fault and I said to myself, be calm, be calm, listen to this mazurka, let the music fill your head, driving all thoughts away.

The music swelled, lulling me, and I turned to look at Tee who had stretched out on the daybed and was reading the New Statesman. He put his heel to his toe and shucked off one brown loafer. It fell to the floor. Heel to other toe as he shucked off the second loafer. It did not fall but lay on its side on the daybed while I stared at the loafer, thinking I will not think about anything but that – the loafer – I will contemplate the loafer and listen to the music and will not think. I-will-not-think.

Terence was watching me. He was just pretending to read his paper. I knew he had guessed the mean thoughts I’d been having about him and now he was silently asking me what had I done with my life to give me the right to criticize what he had done with his?

And I said to myself I’m not going to get into an argument with him about that or anything else. But it was no good. I did get into an unspoken argument. I said to myself, look here, now.

There doesn’t have to be any purpose.

There doesn’t

have

to be

any PURPOSE.

Ordinary people live ordinary unmeaningful lives. (I said to myself.)

There doesn’t have to be

any

PURPOSE.

Take women. Most women don’t even live lives of quiet desperation. (Quiet desperation is far too dramatic.) Most women live lives like doing the dishes, finishing one day’s dishes and facing the next until, one day, the rectal polyp is found or the heart stops and it’s over, they’ve gone. And all that’s left of them is a name on a gravestone.

But it was no good, he was judging me, I knew what he was thinking and so I damn well judged him, I looked up at Dostoyevsky on the wall and look here Fëdor, I said to myself, would you have put aside your novel for a sure thing, for a little musical the way Terence did? Damn right you wouldn’t, Fëdor. But that little revue in London, that really is what Terence is best known for. I remember the afternoon after it opened, we drove up to the theatre on Shaftesbury Avenue to see the notices on the marquee and the theatre manager came out and took our photo with a flash beneath the critics’ kind words. ‘Happiest romp in years – Times.’ ‘Laughed till I cried – Sketch.’ ‘Charming, With-it, Up-to-the-minute! – Mirror.’ I stood there, arm-linked with Tee, smiling for the camera, stood there in a drizzle of rain, and was sad behind my smile, sad for the play Terence had abandoned because ‘they’ had said audiences wouldn’t like it, because ‘they’ had pushed him to write this and now ‘they’ were vindicated by the inanities written over the marquee beneath which we posed. How dare you judge me, Terence, I said to myself, staring at him as he pretended to read his paper, how dare you? Let me tell you something, Tee. If you are with-it and up-to-the-minute then you will never be ahead of it or outside it or apart from it, as genius is, as Proust was apart, as Dostoyevsky was not with it. I stared at him and I was Mad Twin and yes, yes, yes (I thought), you shouldn’t worry about success. Do you hear me, Tee?

There are more things in

life than

Instant

Suck-cess.

And I remember as I sat there staring at him, angry tears in my eyes, the Chopin unheard, Tee, poor Tee turned and looked at me and I saw that Mad Twin had been wrong again, Tee had not judged me, he never judges me and who was I to sit meanly in judgment on him, I who would run to the window and jump if anything happened to him, for what I said to Hat long ago is still true, Terence is my saviour, he restoreth my soul, he has made me happy and I should be ashamed of myself for wanting him to be old Fëdor (my God, I thought, imagine going to bed with that bearded madman with his gambling and his sick lusts after small girls). What normal woman would want a genius as a mate, what does it matter what posterity says about Tee, will I be around to hear the silence of those future years, of course I won’t.

I had turned my head away so that Tee would not see my tears and now I wiped my eyes and looked back at him, but suddenly (I know, it doesn’t sound sensible) but, anyway, I caught him looking at me in a very cold, curious way and I thought, yes he thinks I’m going mad, he’s trying to find out how shaky I am. And as I stared at him he smiled, falsely, and I smiled back because I was afraid of him, yes, afraid, even though I knew that only a mad person would be afraid of Tee. So, therefore, I was mad, and I smiled and smiled and hoped I could deceive him for unless I kept my mad side under control, even Tee, good sweet Terence, would pick up the telephone and call in doctors who would sign papers (for your own good, Mary) and have me taken away and locked up in an asylum.

And if they do lock me up, then I really will lose my mind because I am the sort of person who is very susceptible to environment and if I were to be locked up with a bunch of mad people I would start mimicking them, (that sounds mad: ‘mimicking them’), I mean if I am put in among people like that it could upset me so much that I really would become ill, I mean temporarily deranged, and that could become permanent, permanently deranged, and then they would throw away the key and as all this rushed around in my head while I sat there cravenly smiling at Terence, my enemy, I began in my mind to say an act of contrition, oh my God, I am heartily sorry for having sinned against Thee, because Thou art so good I will never more offend Thee and I will amend my life.

And now, Sweet Mother of God, it was really Down Tilt, I was slipping over the cliff edge, smiling at Tee who had got up from the daybed and was coming towards me and I smiled to him, hello there, hello, I am all right, I was only joking about forgetting my name today, it was just a joke, Terence my love, I am fine, see, I am smiling at you and now you stretch out your hand to take mine, but if I let you hold my hand you will discover that I am trembling and of course that’s why you want to take my hand to see if it is trembling, yes, you don’t want to hold my hand in a loving way, you want it as a doctor does, to feel my pulse but I am on to that, my love, and so I embrace you hard and press myself against you, press so hard I control my shaking hands and I kiss you and pull you down on top of me on the daybed, pretending I am hot and excited and then break away from you and go to pull down the blind while behind me I hear a noise which means you are undressing.

I remember standing there at the window in a sudden lucid moment, divorced from my fear, and I remember thinking: I am getting ready to make love to Terence, just as though I were a prostitute, for I am not doing it for love, or even for tenderness, but simply to prevent him knowing the state I’m in.

I turned around, and was going to say something, I think I was even going to confide in you, Tee, but there you were, waiting, and again I was afraid and so I began to pose for you as you sat there on the daybed, I began to take off my clothes, first my skirt, then my suit jacket, then my bra, standing there in panties, garter belt, and stockings, looking down at you with an actressy smile, turning away from you, showing you my bum as I peeled off my panties, and you had your pants off too, you sat there in your shirt with your prick sticking up inquiringly from under the shirt-tail and as you took off your shirt, I began to take off my garter belt and stockings and my face was close to your naked belly as you pulled your shirt off and I remembered my doom dream, when naked is panic, when naked is the dooms, the glooms, the nightmare in which I see myself in unknown hotel rooms with nameless men: the men differ but I am always the same. I come from the bathroom, naked, my hair down to my hips, my make-up on straight, I go towards the bed and the man stands up. He is naked and his prick is stiff. Naked means no sleep; stiff prick means fuck: it means finishing myself off in the bathroom, later: or lie awake, unfinished, the man asleep beside me and I awake; a sad, female animal.

And now Terence came to me naked and I shook, but you held me, Terence, you pressed me to you and felt my shaking but you held me. I was drowning but I felt your body against mine, your body that fits mine as no other body ever did, your prick against my belly, and I knew I would not drown, for with you, naked is make it new, there is no past, you are my resurrection and my life and out of the depths I cry to you and now Terence maketh me to lie down in green pastures, he restoreth me by his fingers inside me as he kisses my breasts and neck and I take his prick in my hand and come up with him to joy, all my shaking stilled, to that joining, that Mass of the senses, that slow titillation of our parts, until I no longer have a mind, I am one with the moment as we roll and turn and now we change rhythm, we move into that hot frantic driving, to that fuck that encompasseth me, we try to prolong it, hold it back, wait, wait, and now, feeling you drive inside me, excited, excited, I cry with joy, it is not as it used to be with others, there is no fear, there is no ‘Will I and when can I and if I can’t then can I pretend it?’ I feel you know you’re close and I am close, too close, and oh, make it last, think of something else to make it last, but we drive towards it together and I feel you come and I come, we come together and I shake and shudder, I shake and shudder and shake and shake. And lie still.

He lies beside me. There is sweat on my brow and my heart beats loud. But I am at peace.

 

We slept. I woke. I looked at the clock on his work table. ‘Terence, it’s six thirty.’

He yawned, ‘Eeeeeeaaahhh.’ He cat-rubbed his eyes with his knuckles, sat up, and switched on the light. I saw the tiger stripe of black hair which runs from his navel to his pubic bush. ‘How long did we sleep?’ he asked.

‘Two hours,’ I said and then, I thought, Ernie. I was going to cook the leg of lamb, but now it was too late. Terence reached over and kissed me. ‘Listen?’ I said. ‘Could you nip down to the supermarket and get us some lamb chops? I was going to cook a leg of lamb but it’s too late and the butcher’s closed –’

He smiled and cut short my explanation by fondling my breasts. ‘ ’Ow much are these? ’Ow about a couple of nice breasts? Tasty.’

Sometimes he puts me off with those burlesque pleasantries but this afternoon I was feeling so guilty about having to ask him to run down for the chops that I forgave him. I feel guilty with Terence. He has so much to do, yet I’m always asking him to help me with the few things I have to do. He’s organized and I’m not. I remember thinking that people like Ernie Truelove are always on time. I jumped up, grabbed my clothes, and ran for my bathroom as Tee sprinted past me like some young, naked satyr, making for the other bathroom down the hall.

In the bathroom, I looked in the mirror. My face smiled back at me, mirroring that quotation about ‘the lineaments of gratified desire’, which described my lineaments very nicely at that moment, thank you and thank you, Mr Lavery, sir. I thought of Hat saying, ‘All you want is to be fucked, fucked, fucked until the come is running out of you,’ and yes sir, Hat, I recommend it, it does wonders for pre-menstrual tension and there in the bathroom as I began to clean my face, I thought of Terence going to get the lamb chops: he never minds doing an errand because he loves me. Mackie never minded doing errands for me: there was no chore she would not do so long as she had me to herself. In one of the rows I had with him, Jimmy said, ‘Look, you go to work with her, you have lunch with her, you spend your evenings with her. I know, it’s not your fault. I have to study. But dammit, Mary, except for the time we’re asleep in this bed, when are you and I together? I mean, we used to talk about my job at Loblaws’, about the T. Eaton Company and the Blodgetts and Nova Scotia and school and all those things we used to laugh about. But I tell you, kid (he liked to say, I tell you, kid), I sit here night after night at dinner listening to you and Mackie going on about Canada’s Own and this one and that one, giggling away, the pair of you, and for Christ’s sake I’ve nothing to say to you now, she’s your buddy, you’re more married to her than you are to me.’

‘Well, you’re the one who’s studying.’

‘And what about you? When you’re not sitting in there with Mackie, you’re out with a bunch of actors.’

‘I’m in acting class. The one you and Mackie so kindly arranged for me. What’s wrong, do you want me to quit acting? Do you?’

‘I’m not talking about acting, stop trying to change the subject.’

‘Who’s trying to change the subject?’

‘You were.’

‘I was not.’

‘You were. Anyway, I was talking about you and her. Do you realize that you and I can never sit alone in that living-room? Do you realize I never can start a conversation with you without keeping an eye out for her ladyship to walk in, plunk herself down, and listen in on every word we’re saying?’

‘Well, it’s her house.’

‘Exactly. Exactly.’

‘You were the one who wanted to move in here, Jimmy, not me.’

‘Oh, Christ,’ he would shout and run out of the bedroom.

Yet, even in fights, we were three. After each row, when the thick silence of dissent perched over our meals, there was Mackie, passing sauce or more meat, eyes nun-glancing from Jimmy to me, maintaining a ‘tactful’ silence which, in effect, condemned Jimmy, for, in all the time she and I used to spend together, she managed to ignore the fact of my marriage, never saying anything which would connect the Maria I was for her with that guilty, young married woman, who, each evening at some point of going to bed – undressing, combing my hair, brushing my teeth – had the same small unhappy thought. I hope he doesn’t want to, tonight.

Yet, years later, Hat screamed at me that all I had ever wanted was to be fucked, fucked, fucked. And I believed him. Just as I believed Jimmy when he said, ‘You know what you are, you’re a virgin, that’s what you are, you’re as cold as a bloody plaster saint.’ Jimmy’s right, I thought, I am cold, it’s my fault, there’s something wrong with me.

It’s funny how I believed Jimmy, just as I believed Hat. In those days I thought men more intelligent than women. Yet, I also believed I was very intelligent. It makes me smile now to remember my lost innocence, but, when men said flattering things to me and wanted to hire me, when train conductors went out of their way to explain things for me, when other girls’ fathers acted fatherly to me, it never occurred to me that it was because of my looks. I thought myself to be too tall: I thought my nose was too big, I wanted a bobbed nose and one of those meaningless doll faces people in small towns think pretty. Even with Mackie, I thought it was my brains that attracted her. I thought she’d taken that first shine to me and hired me because she too had once worked in the same awful directory place and that she saw me as a younger version of herself. And it wasn’t until she made that strange confession four months after I first met her, that I realized my brains had nothing to do with it. She came out with it one evening when, typically, Jimmy was upstairs studying. And Mackie said, ‘I’ve been reading a book about romantic love, I mean the romantic love poets write about, a pure love that is romantic because it never can be fulfilled. Chivalric love, do you remember?’

I said yes, although I still hadn’t caught on.

‘Chivalric love,’ she said. ‘Chivalric, because it is doomed. Like my love.’

And so, surprised, stupidly, I said, ‘Your love? I didn’t know you were in love.’

She smiled at me. ‘Oh Maria,’ she said. ‘Do you remember the first day you walked into my office in the library? Do you know what happened? I looked up at you and felt dizzy. I felt I was going to faint. I remember the first thing I thought, when the dizziness cleared, was that your coat was cheap and your shoes were worn.’

‘My coat?’ I said. ‘I don’t understand, what had that to do with your feeling dizzy?’

‘I mean,’ she said, ‘I didn’t know you at all, I’d never seen you before, but I wanted to buy you a beautiful coat and beautiful shoes; which you should have. I remember thinking I would like to see your face framed in furs.’

‘Mackie.’ (I was embarrassed. I remember I laughed, but she didn’t.)

‘No,’ she said. ‘It’s true. I remember I brought you the magazine article you’d asked for and then I went back and sat down at my own desk and I said to myself this girl will read the article she came to read and then she’ll go away and I’ll never see her again unless I do something about it, something extraordinary. Do you realize what happened that day, do you realize what it took for me to go back and talk to you and then, when you told me where you worked, I had this mad idea and I ran in to see McKinnon and asked for you as my assistant. Do you remember, Maria, oh, what a day that was. Chivalric love, I said. Lord, I was a knight in armour that day, I had no fear, I really bullied old McKinnon into taking you, remember?

I sat staring at her as she told me this story. I remember thinking, why, she’s not even aware of the true meaning of what she’s saying. I remember feeling embarrassed for her, yet protective of her too, thinking she loves me and I don’t love her, doesn’t she realize I’m a married woman, poor thing, what’s why she wants Jimmy and me to live with her, she’s a Lesbian without knowing it. (I had only recently read about Lesbians, I didn’t know much about them, but after she told me her story I remember thinking there’s something morally wrong about us going on living here, using this poor woman. We should move out. And I should get some other job.)

But I didn’t tell Jimmy what she’d said. And we didn’t move out. I chose to forget she’d ever said it. I thought her love was doomed, as she said it was. Nothing would ever come of it. Besides, I thought, how could I break it to her, how could I hurt her by telling her what I think is wrong with her?

She said her love was chivalric. She meant it was a pure love, a love in which she loved me more than she loved herself. But, of course, she was wrong. Her love was not chivalric, it was selfish. She was pleased with herself for having captured me and carried me off into her bookstacks and into her home. As, later, she was so jealous of my love for Hat that she must tell Jimmy about it, hoping to destroy it. I remember in the cab this morning I thought of Jimmy who said he loved me, but who, in reality, wanted a face and a body which happened to be mine. Sad as it sounds, Mackie was the same. For she loved a girl she invented, a girl she called Maria. There was no Maria. There was only me.

 

‘Lamb chops,’ Terence said. ‘Want anything else?’

He was at the bathroom door, dressed, his hair combed. I said no, I had everything. I heard the front door close and I thought damn, damn, why did I invite Ernie Truelove to dinner, how much nicer it would have been to spend tonight alone with Tee. I thought I won’t bother doing my hair, I haven’t time, I’ll wear my fall and as I said that I thought of the fall, sitting on its oval-faced styrofoam dummy head on my bedroom windowsill, I remember I thought I’ll finish up my face here in the bathroom, then put on my op-art dress, the one I got at Ohrbach’s with the short skirt, it’s swingy, and I was just lining in my mouth with my lipstick brush when I heard the doorbell. Terence forgot his wallet, I thought, he always forgets it when he changes clothes.

‘Door’s open,’ I shouted. I knew I hadn’t locked the catch earlier.

I heard him come in.

‘Did you forget your wallet?’ I called, but there was no answer. I’d finished my mouth so I got up and went out into the hall, going to the bedroom for my dress. There, facing me in the hall, was Ernie Truelove.

And me with my terry-cloth robe open, exposing to him my bare breasts, my panties. I clutched the robe shut. I could have killed him.

‘Oh, gee, I’m sorry,’ he said, but his face was hanging open, his eyes were still glazed over by his staring at my breasts. I moved past him into my bedroom. I was shaking. I called, ‘I’ll be with you in a minute. Go in the living-room and, ah, get yourself a drink.’

I heard his footsteps retreat. I started to get into my dress and, as I did, his voice boomed out. ‘Gosh, Maria, I’m sorry, I didn’t know I was early, I mean I didn’t mean to inconvenience you like this. Gosh. Listen, just pretend I’m not here, okay?’

‘Don’t worry, it’s all right, I won’t be a minute. There’s drinks on the living-room table and ice in the kitchen fridge.’

‘No hurry,’ his voice boomed. And then, ‘Hey, Maria, gosh it’s good to see you again.’

Well, you’ve certainly seen plenty of me, haven’t you, I thought, as I slipped on my op-art dress.

‘Your husband home?’

‘No, he went out, he’ll be back in a moment.’

‘Gee, what a place you have here.’

I was trying to fix my hair, and put the fall on. Why couldn’t he shut up and read a magazine or something? I rushed, and, as soon as I’d finished, I put on my red shoes, looked at my skirt in the mirror, then stepped out into the hall. I saw Ernie in the living-room, but he hadn’t yet seen me. I looked at him for a moment as he stood by the window, a large lumpish man, very Canadian square, in his navy blazer, white shirt, maroon tie, flannels, and sensible black brogues. As I went towards the living-room, he heard me coming and turned to peer at me in a way which made me think he ordinarily wears glasses. His eyes, I noticed, were a sea-grey colour with strange amber flecks in the irises.

‘Now,’ I said, very hostessy, ‘What will you have to drink?’

‘Oh, whatever you’ve got.’

‘Well, we’ve lots of things. Rye, Scotch, bourbon, gin, vodka, sherry – I think we have just about everything.’

‘I would say you have,’ he said looking around the room pointedly to show me he is aware of ‘everything’. Hands clasped behind his back, policeman-like, he rocked gently on his heels. ‘Yes, I would say you have it made, Maria.’

And of course, the way he said it made me feel guilty, the guilty feeling you get when you meet old friends who have not been materially successful. ‘What about a Scotch and soda?’ I asked.

‘Well, let’s see.’ He bent over the drinks tray, hands still clasped behind his back. ‘Ah, me. Choice is the foetus of unhappiness. Let’s see-eee.’

Silence for a moment, as he read labels on bottles.

‘Hmm,’ he said. ‘There’s always rye and ginger ale, the old Canadian standby.’

‘Rye and ginger,’ I said, moving towards the drinks.

‘But, maybe that would seem corny to you?’

‘Why should it?’ I asked.

‘Well, now that you’re one of the “smarts”.’

‘Smarts?’

‘You know,’ he said. ‘The sort of people who get written up in Time magazine.’

‘That’s a new one. Smarts?’

‘You’re married to one, Maria, my dear. Your present husband was written up by Time, wasn’t he?’

That ‘present husband’ angered me, so I said, ‘Oh, come off it, Ernie. Since when did you become a professional hick?’

He laughed without amusement, throwing his head back to simulate mirth. ‘Professional hick, eh? That’s rare. That is rare.’

At that moment, I remember, Terence came into the living-room. At once, Ernie stopped laughing. ‘This is Terence,’ I began, but Ernie cut me off at once with a great explosion. ‘Oh, you don’t have to tell me, Maria, why, I’d know your husband anywhere. It’s an honour, a great honour to meet you, Terence.’

‘Well, how do you do,’ Terence said, smiling, embarrassed, holding out his hand, which Ernie took and held, saying, ‘Yes, indeed, and what’s more I’ve read your books and seen your revue and admired your drawings and let’s not forget your play which I’m looking forward to seeing when it comes out with – who is it playing the lead, is it David Niven?’

‘Well, not actually.’

‘Anyway, I feel I know all about you. In short, Terence, I am a fan of yours, a real honest-to-God fan.’

‘Well, in that case I’d better get you a drink,’ Terence said hurriedly, going towards the drinks tray.

I had been putting ice into glasses and now I handed one of them to Tee, saying, ‘Ernie would like a rye and ginger.’

‘Rye and ginger?’ Ernie said. ‘You’re kidding, Maria.’

‘I thought that’s what you said a moment ago.’

Ernie laughed and I remember thinking he looked like a cow in a Disney cartoon. ‘Now you have to be kidding,’ he said. ‘Where’s that good old Canadian sense of humour?’ He turned to Terence. ‘You see, Terence, she’d just called me a professional hick. So I thought I’d better act the part properly. Rye and ginger, ha, ha.’

I remembered that I called him a professional hick after he ordered rye and ginger. I looked at him, thinking why are the awful ones, the horrors, why are they all my so-called friends? And, as if confirming it, Ernie turned to Terence, put his hand on Terence’s sleeve, and said, ‘I called you Terence and I should know better. I know you British don’t first name every stranger you meet. And a good thing too. I’m sorry. Forgive me.’

‘No, no, that’s all right,’ Terence said, embarrassed. ‘I mean call me Terence or whatever you like.’

‘Well, thank you,’ Ernie said. ‘Of course, in my own case I like to be called by my first name. I hate my last name. Truelove. Wouldn’t you?’

‘Umm.’ Tee nodded his head affirmatively, like a boy who has just mastered a difficult point in class. ‘Now, what will you drink?’

‘Teacher’s,’ Ernie said. ‘Teacher’s Highland Cream and a spot of water would do me nicely.’

‘And what about you, darling?’

‘A martini,’ I said. I felt I was going to need it. I asked Tee if he’d got the chops all right, and when he said yes, I excused myself and went to the kitchen, thinking again, oh God, why did I invite him and then, just as it did with old Mr Dieter Peters this morning, my mulish, unbiddable memory yielded up a sudden, isolated moment; Beaver Lake in Montreal and I, walking along the edge of the pond in the moonlight with Ernie Truelove, and I remembered that as we walked I was confiding in him and that, later, I knew it was a mistake. But I could not remember what it was I confided to Ernie. I thought: he took me out to dinner once or twice, the time I was living in Montreal and Hat was off in Europe and I was waiting for my divorce from Jimmy. But that was all I had time to remember for at that point Tee came into the kitchen, carrying a martini for me, his look saying hurry back. I took the martini, said I’d be in in a minute, and began to rush, setting the table in the dining-room, getting out a little jar of caviar and some melba toast, finally becoming so jittery about leaving Tee with Ernie that I stopped everything, took the caviar and toast, and went back into the living-room.

‘Caviar?’ Ernie brayed.

‘Oh,’ Tee said, beginning to spoon some out for him. ‘Do you like it?’

‘Well, let me say this.’ Ernie paused, put his hands on his kneecaps, and leaned forward like a judge announcing his decision. ‘Let me say it’s not something which I’ve had enough of to allow me to become tired of it.’ Smiling; waiting for Tee and me to collapse in a fit of laughter. We did not oblige him, so he added, ‘Yes, indeed. Caviar. The height of sophistication.’

I remember at that point I asked him if he was still with Canada’s Own. He said, yes, he was still on the desk and Terence asked if the ‘desk’ meant copy-editing.

‘Yes, indeedy,’ Ernie said. ‘We also serve who only punctuate.’ He picked up his Scotch, drank it as if it were coke, then munched a biscuit with caviar. ‘Dee-licious,’ he informed us. ‘What a nice spread these fish eggs be.’ Nodding wisely, licking his lips, leaning towards Terence. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘Maria here was quite the little Cassandra, in my case. She told my fortune once. She said if I didn’t get off the desk then – that was years ago – that I’d stay on it all my life. Looks as though she was right.’

‘Your fortune?’ I said. ‘I told your fortune?’

‘Yes, don’t you remember? It was just after I met you, I mean in Montreal. You were living in a flat on Ridgewood and you gave a party for old Mackie McIver one weekend when she came up from Toronto. Remember? I was there and the Sloanes and Eddie Downes. And after dinner you told fortunes.’

‘Not me,’ I said. ‘Mackie was the one who told fortunes.’ And, as I said it, I remembered her sitting on the floor in her good ‘dinner dress’ (it was black velvet), looking like an old child as she read our palms. And, reading mine, staring into my eyes as she told me things, things I knew then were disguised professions of love. ‘No,’ I said to Ernie. ‘Maybe my memory isn’t great, but I do remember that. Mackie was the one who told your fortune.’

‘Wrong, Maria. Wrong. She did tell my fortune but afterwards I asked you to tell my fortune and you laughed and pretended to read my palm and then you said that about my staying on the desk for life unless I left it within the next three months.’

He was so vehement, I thought, well, what does it matter? I said, perhaps he was right, but I certainly didn’t remember ever telling him that.

‘Ah.’ He shook his head, sadly. ‘There are so many things you don’t remember.’

‘Like what?’

‘Like, for instance, how you promised to phone me when you came back to Montreal. You’ve been back quite a few times since, but I’m still waiting for that phone call.’

Yes. I suppose I did promise to phone him, I thought, but, dammit, when I go to Montreal it’s only for a few days, I can’t phone everybody.

‘Am I right, Maria?’ he asked.

‘Yes. I’m sorry.’

Abruptly, he turned to Tee and thrust out his glass. ‘Can I trouble you for a refill?’

Tee got up and poured Ernie another Scotch. I went back to the kitchen. I thought the sooner we eat, the sooner we’ll be rid of him. I remember looking into the living-room and seeing the back of his head, his brilliantined brown hair carefully combed over a vulnerable little bald spot at the crown. And as I stared at his head, he leaned forward and placed the drink Terence had just given him on a coaster on the coffee table. The neatly combed-over bald spot, the precise gesture of placing his drink, reminded me of his neatness in other things. How, before he began his day’s work as a copy-editor, he would sharpen six pencils and arrange them in a neat row near his right hand. How, the first night I was in his apartment, I opened his kitchen cupboard to get a glass and there were his dishes and glasses, stacked under neat typewritten labels: ‘plates, soup; glasses, sherry; saucers, small’, and so on.

Always neat. And then (probably because I was in my own kitchen at the time), remembering his neatly labelled kitchen shelves, I remembered the first time I saw his apartment. It was the night I came back from Ottawa after the senate divorce hearing: my divorce from Jimmy. Jimmy had not been present in Ottawa. The grounds against him had been adultery and desertion, both false. The divorce was collusive because, by then, Jimmy also wanted a divorce. At least I kept telling myself he did. But I wasn’t really sure. Perhaps he was saying it just to save his pride? Anyway, when I arrived back in Windsor station in Montreal that night, I remembered how Jimmy and I had waited in that same railroad station at the beginning of our marriage, waited for O’Keefe to send us enough money to go to Toronto after Old Tom, the idiot, had gone home to Halifax with his father. And, remembering, I felt down. I wasn’t expecting to see anyone there in the station. I had planned to go home and go to bed. But Ernie Truelove and his girl were standing at the ticket gate. Sally something, yes, Sally Harper, her name was. Taller than Ernie, a blonde. They had come, they said, to invite me to have supper with them at Ernie’s place and while I didn’t want to go, I didn’t know how to say no in those days and so they put me into Ernie’s little Renault and drove me up Mount Royal to Ernie’s apartment, which was very close to Beaver Lake.

It was summer, very hot, and when I walked into the apartment I was met by a blast of talk, and people coming forward to kiss me or shake hands. Ernie had assembled nearly all the people I knew at that time in Montreal: Janice and Charles Sloane, Blair and Peggy O’Connell, the Leducs, and Eddie Downes. It was a typical Montreal sort of party, everybody talking at once, both men and women getting drunk. I remember that someone had cooked lasagna and Blair had brought flasks of Chianti and that when I went into the kitchen to help with the supper, I opened the cupboard and saw Ernie’s glasses and dishes, all stacked and labelled in that odd way.

And it was then, staring at Ernie’s cupboard, that I thought back to the events of the day: I remembered a near-senile senator asking me if there was any hope of ‘patching things up’ between me and Jimmy and my saying, ‘No, sir, no hope,’ as my lawyer had instructed me to. But was there no hope? Wasn’t the whole thing my fault? And what had I let myself in for? Hat was divorcing his wife and I was divorcing Jimmy and I was going to marry Hat. Hat wanted to marry me, but did I want to marry Hat? And suddenly I knew that marrying Hat would be the same thing all over again, the sex thing wasn’t right with him, as it had not been right with Jimmy. I thought: there is something wrong with me sexually. If it’s not right with me and Hat, it’s my fault. And then, trying to cheer up, I decided that at least, with Hat, it was better than it had been with Jimmy. Besides, the divorces were all in court. We’d gone this far: too late to back out. And I thought: I like Hat and I can learn to overcome this sex thing.

And as I thought those gloomy thoughts, roars of laughter were coming from Ernie’s living-room. It was like a wake, it was a bunch of people celebrating the death of my marriage to Jimmy. I felt sick, and so, when the other women in the kitchen weren’t looking in my direction, I let myself out of the back door and stood there in the moonlight in Ernie’s little back garden and I was physically sick. Where, a few minutes later, Ernie found me, sitting on his solitary garden chair, my head between my knees. I said no, I wasn’t drunk, I’d had very little to drink, but I remember he ignored that and suggested a walk along the lake to clear my head. And so, we climbed up a slope behind his garden and there was Beaver Lake (it’s a park pond, not a lake), bright and unreal in the summer moonlight.

So Ernie and I walked along the edge of Beaver Lake, the guest of honour with the host, the noise of the party behind us. I don’t think I was even aware of Ernie, I was so full of my own miseries. And then, suddenly, he walked a few quick paces ahead of me, wheeled back, and stood there blocking my path.

‘Why were you crying, Maria?’

I stared at him in the moonlight. There was something frightening about him. ‘Aren’t you happy?’ he asked.

And I, like a fool, began to cry again and said, ‘No, I’m not.’

He caught at my arm and gave it a little shake: he was so eager to get my whole attention. ‘I love you,’ he said. ‘I’ve never loved anyone before.’

I stared at him. I thought he was drunk. I said to him, ‘But what about Sally?’

‘That’s not the same. I like Sally, but, look, you should know. A person can’t choose who they fall in love with, can they? I’m in love with you, Maria. You’re the worst possible person, you don’t care about me, you probably never think of me, but I can’t help that, I love you. I will always love you.’

I will always love you. That is what he said, and tonight, in the kitchen, just before serving dinner, it came back to me. And something else came back too, something Janice Sloane said to me earlier, at lunch, something about Ernie Truelove having broken up ‘with that girl, Sally something’, and I thought, my God, it’s true, he’s broken up with Sally because he thinks he’s in love with me.

And that frightened me. For it is frightening to be loved by someone you don’t love, someone you don’t even care about. And I remember thinking, what if Ernie starts going on to Terence about this love of his, what if he manages to make Terence believe that there was something between himself and me. Which sent me hurrying back into the living-room, the dinner not ready, afraid to stay away, afraid to miss what mad Ernie might tell Tee.

When I walked back into the living-room, Ernie did a strange thing. He sat up in his chair, put his legs together, sticking them straight out in front of him, then raised them up as though he were doing some gymnastic exercise. And there, his feet together balancing in the air, staring at his large black brogues, he pronounced, ‘Well, let me say this. I think New York, is, well, decadent is the only word for it.’

Tee was pouring another drink. ‘Umm,’ said Tee.

‘Let me explain what I mean by that, Terence,’ Ernie said. ‘As I see it, there are three types of people in New York. First of all, there are the people who were born here. Ordinary people who live in the Bronx, or wherever. You follow?’

Tee nodded. I thought how bored he must be.

‘That’s one category. Then there is a second category. People like you, Terence, whose specialized skills bring them to New York. Well and good.

‘That’s the second category. The third category is different. And it’s a big one, believe you me. And let me say this. The third category is the reason that, for me, at least, New York stinks.’

He turned to me, showing his large horseteeth, hissing out the word ‘stinks.’

‘The third category,’ he said. ‘The third category is made up of no-talent jerks, people who come here from other towns and, because they live in New York, somehow they think they’re better than the rest of us. Do you follow me, Terence?’

‘Umm,’ said Terence.

Ernie put his glass to his mouth. He had finished his drink and now he crunched the ice cube with his large teeth.

‘Another drink?’ Terence asked, and Ernie thrust his glass rudely in Terence’s direction. Then turned mad eyes on me. ‘I saw a play last night, Maria.’

‘Any good?’

‘Well, the main feature of this thee-atrical performance was that an actor got up on stage and gave the audience a look at his bare bum.’

‘The Marat-Sade,’ Terence said, handing Ernie far too big a Scotch.

‘His bare bum,’ Ernie said. ‘Now if that isn’t decadence, what is?’ He took a gulp of the Scotch. ‘Well, I guess it’s all we deserve, this fag theatre. I suppose it’s a natural reaction.’

‘Against what?’ Terence asked politely.

‘Against this female domination of the North American continent,’ Ernie said. ‘That’s what.’

Headshaking again, a Savonarola warning against the evils of the times. ‘Yes, I suppose we have to have something for the fags too. I mean, show them a few male bums to excite them. I mean, is that any different from these so-called actresses? I mean, how do you like that? There isn’t one so-called actress in the business today who isn’t ready to get up in front of an audience of total strangers and walk around showing her naked boobs, just like a whore. Now, isn’t that something.’

Looking at me as he said it: his mad eyes. I thought of earlier, my robe open, those eyes of his glazed over as he stared at my breasts.

‘Styles change,’ Tee said. ‘A few years ago topless men in blue jeans were all the rage at the box office.’

But Ernie was not to be deflected. ‘You were an actress,’ he accused me. ‘Would you take off your bra if a director asked you to?’

I looked at him and Mad Twin rose up inside me. ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about,’ I said to him. ‘There are plenty of actresses who won’t do those things.’

‘Then they won’t get any parts.’ Horseteeth showing. Horrid laugh. ‘No, nowadays, it’s strip or get off the pot.’

I got up and said I had to put the chops on. As I went into the kitchen his voice pursued me, booming, fading, coming up again . . . ‘Like or not like . . . I don’t know about that . . . Take me, I was one of those children other children just don’t like. And you know, Terence, that has carried over into my adult life. I am not someone that other people like.’

Correct, I thought, but, oh, why did Tee give him so much to drink, I swear he’s getting drunk. Canadians get drunk, they seem to glory in it. Tee never understands that, he doesn’t know them as I do.

‘You mean in Montreal?’ I heard Ernie say.

‘Yes,’ Tee said. ‘I believe the city is very much changed?’

‘Yes, indeedy, you wouldn’t know the place nowadays. Exciting things are happening in Montreal. You should come up for a visit. You could stay with me, both of you.’

Some mumble from Terence and then the boom of Ernie’s reply, ‘No, no, I’d love to have you as my guests, both of you. It would be an honour having the famous Terence Lavery stay with me.’

‘I’m-not-famous-don’t-be-silly,’ Terence said in an embarrassed rush.

‘You’re not stuck up, I’ll say that,’ Ernie assured him. ‘I’ll tell you a secret. I have a photo of you pinned up on my wall. One that appeared in the paper, of you and Maria, the time you were married. I had a print made up of it and, if anyone asks me, I say I know you. Not true, strictly speaking. I know Maria. But now, it will be true. Because I’ve met you at last.’

Mumble from Tee.

‘I mean it’s sort of like a pin-up, this photo,’ Ernie said. ‘You know. Pretending about girls.’

‘But you weren’t pretending,’ Tee said. ‘You do know Mary and you said she’s in the picture.’

‘Looking lovely. Just beautiful.’

There was a silence and then Terence mumbled something and a moment later was beside me in the kitchen, raising his eyebrows, jerking his head towards the living-room. I looked and saw Ernie out there, his back to me. He seemed to be blowing his nose.

Terence whispered, ‘We were talking about you. He said you were lovely. Then he began to weep. What’s going on?’

I said, ‘Please. Go back in. I’ll serve dinner in a moment.’

It was a stupid thing to say, that thing about the dinner. But I was flustered. I gave Tee an imploring look and he nodded and went back in. I began to rush the dinner, all the time trying to see and hear what was going on in there. Tee went back and sat on the sofa, his long legs crossed, his arms spreadeagled along the sofa’s back. Ernie, facing him, sat forward in his chair, eager as a job applicant. And, as I carried plates and dishes into the dining-room, I heard Ernie say, ‘Yes, my own writings. Yes, that was and is my ambition. Like Hat, Mary’s husband. We both hoped to write something worthwhile.’

I thought: I must keep him off Hat, I’ll announce dinner. I went in and, as I did, Ernie stopped talking and rose up with exaggerated politeness, gesturing for me to sit down. He staggered slightly.

‘Ernie’s been telling me about his writing,’ Tee said.

‘My unpublished novel,’ Ernie said. ‘You’re in it, Maria. Yes, yes, you’re in it, all right. I have this marvellous scene between you and Mackie McIver. She still asks after you, you know.’

‘Oh,’ I said, very cold. ‘How is she?’

‘Oh, same as ever. Any time I go to Toronto, I always drop in to see her at the library. And we talk about you. Funny. She’s very fond of you, in a strange sort of way.’

‘Mnn,’ I said. I turned to Tee. ‘Tee, will you help me with the plates? Dinner’s ready.’

‘Tee?’ Ernie said. ‘A pet name, is it? I know Maria’s a great one for pet names. Remember, Maria, you were the one who christened Mackie “Mackie”. For Mack the Knife.’

It had nothing to do with Mack the Knife, I thought. Where did he get that idea? And then, as we settled in at the table, Ernie still holding on to his Scotch, he took a drink and said, drunkenly, ‘Yess-sss, it suited her too. She put the knife in you, didn’t she? You know, telling Jimmy about you and Hat.’

Quickly, I snatched up the redcurrant jelly and offered it to him. ‘Try some of this with your lamb.’

He stared at the dish. ‘What is it?’

‘Redcurrant jelly.’

‘With lamb? I never heard of that.’

‘Perhaps it’s a British taste?’ Tee suggested.

‘Mint sauce is British too,’ Ernie informed us. ‘That I do know. I must say, however, to be perfectly frank, I prefer mint jelly. That’s the Canadian thing to have with lamb.’

Tee stared at his plate. I thought, why is it always my friends who are the really giant bores? Ah yes, Ernest Truelove, what a brilliant conversationalist you are. Will you please shut up?

But, oh, no. He was off again.

‘Yes, I’ve noticed that about the British,’ he said. ‘They like those made-up sauces. HP sauce and A1 sauce and Worcestershire sauce and another one, let me think, yes, I remember, Lea and Perrin’s sauce. Funny, isn’t it, that they’re so fond of all those sauces?’

‘The cooking’s so bad at home,’ Terence said, rising and pouring wine.

‘Is that a fact?’ Ernie said. ‘I’ve never been there, you know. Of course the poor eat very badly, right?’

Terence looked startled. ‘Yes, they do. As they do in most countries, I suppose.’

‘Ah, but in England you have this class thing. I hope I’m not offending you.’

‘Should I be offended?’ Terence said, smiling.

‘Well, you’re upper class, aren’t you?’

Terence laughed. ‘My old mum would be very pleased to hear you say that. She’s an awful snob.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘And she’s a char at the Ministry of Transport offices in London.’

‘Char?’ Ernie’s head went up. ‘What’s that?’

‘Charwoman. Cleaning woman,’ Terence said.

‘Ah, come on. You’re having me on.’ Ernie laughed his horse laugh and gulped at his wine, but I saw that he was angry. ‘I may be a professional hick,’ he said, ‘but I do know an upper-class British accent when I hear it. You can’t tell me you’re working class. Because I am working class. My dad’s a plumber in Brockville, Ontario.’

‘Well,’ said Terence, switching accents, ‘I do talk ever so nice, but you mustn’t pay no heed to that. I’m a bloody great fraud, mate.’

But Ernie was not amused. His face was red with drink and discomfiture.

‘Honestly, Ernie, it’s true,’ I found myself saying. ‘Terence won a scholarship to Oxford.’

‘Exactly,’ Ernie said. ‘Oxford University. It’s a long way from Sir George Williams College where I went. In Montreal. A YMCA school.’ He turned on Terence. ‘So, let me say this. I don’t know whether you’re joking about your mother being a cleaning woman. But I am not joking. I am not middle class. No one could ever take me for middle class.’

He turned to me. ‘You, Maria,’ he said. ‘You’re middle class. Your father was a stockbroker, wasn’t he?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘He was not a stockbroker, how could he have been, you don’t have stockbrokers in a place like Butchersville. My father was a small-town businessman with a lumber business that went bust and if it hadn’t been for the war, God knows what would have happened to him.’

Terence had begun to laugh, seesawing over his plate of food. ‘My old man, yes my old man’s a bigger bust than your old man . . . talk about snobs.’

I looked at Ernie, sure that this would be the final insult, but there he was, beginning to break up himself, old Ernie, turning, pointing to me, ‘Isn’t that funny, her boasting about her old man – failed, lumber – yes, I agree, that is rare. Rare.’

I sat and stared at them and felt as I did long ago when boys laughed at me because I was a girl and I said to myself Terence is not disloyal to me, he’s just trying to smooth things over, but it seemed disloyal and I found myself with tears coming into my eyes and, then, worse, their laughing stopped and they looked at me, concerned.

‘It was just a joke,’ Ernie said. ‘Just a joke, Maria.’ And I saw Tee look worried and I thought, he believes I’m mad, yes he does and anything to stop him thinking that, so I began babbling, sounding rambling and disconnected, I suppose. I don’t remember, but I remember lying and saying my tears had nothing to do with their laughing at me, it had to do with something unpleasant that happened to me earlier, something I’d just remembered.

Of course, they both asked what was it, this unpleasant thing and, I don’t know why, I found myself starting to tell them about the man who insulted me in the street this morning. And when I said this man, a well-dressed, normal-seeming man, had said something filthy to me, Ernie’s face went suddenly eager. ‘Said what?’ he asked. ‘I mean what exactly did he say?’

‘Oh, just something obscene.’

‘But what?’ he persisted, and, angry with him, I thought, all right, Ernie Truelove, you asked for it. I leaned in Ernie’s direction, stared into his blind, amber-flecked eyes, and said, ‘Well, this man said to me – I’d like to fuck you, baby.’

Ernie’s face tightened. I mean I actually saw the skin tighten, saw his ears go flat. He put down his fork, very deliberately, and sat, his blind stare fixed on his plate. A perfect blush spread from his jaw up his cheeks as he contemplated again what the stranger had said. ‘Gosh,’ said Ernie. ‘Gosh – and yet –’ he turned to Terence – ‘Do you know, Terence, I sometimes say to myself, well, there but for the grace of the five hundred miles that separates me from a woman like Maria, well, there go I.’

I don’t think Terence understood. ‘What?’ said Terence, pouring wine in Ernie’s glass.

‘I mean, I could be that man,’ Ernie said. He looked at Terence, then at me, as though daring us to contradict him. He picked up his knife and fork and cut a piece off his chop.

‘I’m mentioning this,’ he said, ‘because it might interest Terence. Creative persons are often interested in hearing about abnormal states of mind.’ He laughed and raised the piece of meat to his mouth. ‘Such as love,’ he said. He put the meat into his mouth and began to chew and talk all at once. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Love. Let me tell you, Terence, what happened to me nine years ago. I’d come down to Toronto for the day for a meeting at our main office at Canada’s Own. After my conference with McKinnon, our chief, I went into the library to look up something. And there she was.’

Still chewing, he turned to me, his mouth half open, showing the food particles. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Maria. I can even remember what she was wearing. It was what they call a shirtwaist dress with red and black – no, it was pink and black – candy stripes. I remember the pink matched the pink of her lips. And I remember I asked her for some files and she brought them to me, but, you know, I didn’t do a stitch of work. I just sat there until plane time. And let me say this. I was in love. Yes, indeedy.’

‘Of course,’ Terence said, trying to make a joke of it, ‘that famous Dunne mesmerism.’

‘Yes, yes,’ Ernie said. ‘And, do you know, although I didn’t see her again for four months – four whole months – I don’t think there was a single day I didn’t think about her. And you’d better believe this. I didn’t even know she was married. I never even noticed her wedding ring. Isn’t that something?’

‘Umm,’ said Tee.

‘I guess I’m talking too much?’

‘My ears are burning,’ I said. ‘Come on, let’s change the subject.’

‘Change the subject?’ Ernie fixed me in his stare. ‘Why, you changed this subject, all right, all right. Me. You changed my whole life.’

‘Come on,’ I said. ‘What an exaggeration.’

He shook his head, staring at me. ‘Oh no,’ he said. ‘Oh no, it’s not.’

He stared at me. I stared at him, at this forgotten admirer who said I changed his life. In the carnival hall of mirrors which is our memory, we distort what we see. In Ernie’s mirror image of me, I am magnified, elongated into a girl who led him on, the object of his great, unhappy, unfulfilled love. While he, in the equal if opposite distortion of my mind’s mirror, is reduced to a squat manikin from my past, a dull stranger, remembered only for his minor quirks.

I stared at him as, guiltily, he gulped his wine. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘I’ll bet I’m boring Maria. In the past she often brought it to my attention that I bored her. And it’s true, I’m not very interesting. I know. But perhaps Terence would be interested?’

In the living-room the phone began to ring.

‘I’ll get it,’ I said to Tee.

‘No, I’ll get it, it’s for me, most likely.’

There was no escape, Tee was up and out of the dining-room. The phone stopped ringing and Ernie and I sat there, embarrassed. Tee’s voice from the living-room: ‘Hello? . . . yes, how’d it go? . . . mnn . . . mnn.’

While Ernie slewed around in his chair. ‘Alone at last.’

‘What did you say?’ I said, making my voice as cold as I knew.

‘Philadelphia?’ Terence said on the phone. ‘Why not New Haven?’

‘Why did you never phone me when you went back to Montreal?’ Ernie asked.

‘I forgot.’

‘Are you mad at me, Maria?’

‘Well,’ I said, ‘wouldn’t you be, if you were me? Going on about my not phoning you. I’ve only been back in Montreal twice, both times on very short visits. I can’t phone everybody. I’m sorry.’

‘Am I everybody?’

‘How many weeks?’ Terence said on the phone. ‘Five?’

‘Ernie, don’t be silly. I told you. I forgot.’

‘All right, then you forgot. I suppose, gosh, I suppose that’s the ultimate, yes, the ultimate insult. You forgot. That takes care of me, doesn’t it?’

‘Please,’ I said. ‘I’m not feeling well tonight, let’s not start some big thing.’

‘Put Jack on,’ Terence said on the phone.

‘I still love you,’ Ernie said to me, glancing back surreptitiously into the living-room as he said it.

‘Oh, that’s nonsense.’

‘I do.’

‘Oh, shut up. How could you?’

‘How could I? Because I can, because I do, because I can’t help myself. I told you all that. Don’t tell me you don’t remember?’

‘But I don’t.’

‘Oh, come on, Maria.’ He stared at me reproachfully.

‘Look,’ I said, and now I, too, was glancing back furtively at the living-room where Tee was. ‘All I remember is you took me out to dinner a few times while I was waiting for Hat to come back from Europe. You knew I was going to marry Hat. I told you.’

‘You did not,’ he said, nearly shouting. He peered drunkenly over his shoulder at the living-room, then faced me again. ‘You did not,’ he said, more quietly.

‘Well, I thought I did, but never mind. There was nothing between you and me. What business was it of yours what was going on with my private life?’

‘I was in love with you,’ he said. ‘That’s what business it was.’

‘No, no, put Jack on again,’ Tee said to the phone.

‘All right,’ I said to Ernie (thinking this is stupid, it’s degrading, how did I ever get into it?). ‘But I never said I was in love with you.’

He hung his head. ‘You let me think you were.’

‘When?’

‘Those times I took you out.’

‘I don’t remember anything of the kind.’

‘But you do remember I took you out?’

‘So have a lot of other men.’

‘Oh, Maria,’ he said. ‘Don’t, please. That night you stayed over at my place, we discussed it all night long. I’ll never forget that night, Maria. Never. I’ve never been the same since.’

I did not answer. I looked into his drink-stunned eyes and thought: I don’t remember. What does he mean I stayed over at his place? I did not remember.

In the next room, Tee’s voice said, ‘No, that was the first option, I believe. Check it and you’ll see.’

I thought: nothing ever happened between me and Ernie, that’s nonsense. And then, in panic, I thought: what if there is something wrong with my memory, some Jekyll and Hyde thing? What if I’ve done things I simply don’t remember?

I sat, staring at him. I heard myself say, ‘Ernie, that was, well, it was a long time ago.’

‘For you, maybe,’ he said. ‘For me, it, gosh, it’s, gosh, it’s as clear as the night it happened.’

‘When what happened?’ I was shaking and he saw that I was shaking and that seemed to excite him. ‘You may say you don’t remember,’ he said in a loud, indignant voice. ‘You say you don’t remember it, gosh, you say you don’t remember what was the most important and most, gosh, the most emotional evening in my whole life.’

His eyes, glaring, it’s catching, hysteria, I could feel it starting up in me as we faced each other, hysterically aroused, the food forgotten, even Terence forgotten. It was as though Ernie and I were alone in the apartment. And then, very deliberately, in the loud, over-emphasized voice of a drunk person, Ernie began to speak again. ‘Oh, yes, Maria, I suppose you’d like to forget that. You have a talent for forgetting what really happened, haven’t you? You use people, then you let them drop. Yes, my Lord, when I think of it, the rollcall of the fallen, yes, the ones who’ve fallen out of your favour, like Jimmy Phelan. I only met him once or twice, but he was a very nice guy. A very nice guy. And poor Mackie McIver, all right, so she said somethings about you and Hat, and why not, she was fond of Jimmy too, but anyway, dammit, that woman was like a mother to you, she put you through acting school, you lived in her house, oh yes, you let her drop, just like you let me drop, just like you let Hat drop. Poor Hat, waiting for you all those months. God, when I think of it. Goddammit, Hat was my best friend.’

And while I heard all the rest of it, it was that that I fastened on, Ernie as Hat’s best friend, it struck me as ludicrous, it made everything else he said suspect. ‘Hat’s best friend?’ I said. ‘Oh, come on, Ernie. It’s not so.’

‘It is so,’ he shouted. ‘I was with Hat the night he died. I was the last person to talk to him, the last person he saw.’

Once before, I was told the details of a death. Red Davis read the report of the inquest and told my brother who told me how the hotel maid in the Park Plaza Hotel in New York knocked on the room door at eleven in the morning, got no answer, went in, using her pass key, saw the man on the bed, began to back out, thinking him still asleep, then saw his opened eyes, staring at the ceiling. How she went out, locking the door again as she had been instructed to do in such cases, and ran down the corridor to use the house phone. And when Ernie said he was the last person to talk to Hat, I thought of the last person who must have talked to my father, the woman (whoever she was) who checked into the hotel with him the previous afternoon. They must have undressed and got into bed right away for the coroner put the time of death as late afternoon or early evening. I see my father begin to make love, then slump over and die. I see the woman’s fear as she tries to revive him. I see her stare at his open eyes, wondering whether to close them and cover him up, but she cannot do that, for then the authorities would know someone was with him at the time of his death. So she gets out of bed, puts on her clothes, and leaves the room, closing the door on him. It grows dark; he lies through the night, dead eyes staring at the ceiling, the glare of the New York sky casting its red pall over his naked body. First light, then morning sunlight and, at eleven, a pass key in the door, his vigil ended.

I sat and remembered it all, saw that which I never really saw. When my father died, I was two thousand miles away in school. If Red Davis had not told Dick and Dick had not repeated the story to me, I would never have known it. I would be a different woman today. I did not want Ernie to tell me how Hat had died. He died in Montreal and he died suddenly, was all that man said that night at Molly Lupowitz’s party.

But there was Ernie, mad Ernie, glaring and, God, I’d have done I don’t know what to get off the subject of death, so I said, ‘The evening, I mean, the evening you were talking about, the night you say I stayed over at your place, when was that, Ernie? Please, I’m not pretending, it’s just that there’s something funny with my memory today, I can’t remember things. I mean I can’t remember anything.’

Which seemed to mollify him a bit, for he picked up the wine bottle, poured the dregs of it into his glass, drank it in a swallow, nodded, leaned forward, nodded again, and said, ‘All right. Very good, let’s assume, yes, let’s assume you’re not kidding me. Yes, we’ll assume that. You don’t recall that evening which, as I said, was the most important, the most emotional evening of my whole life. Well, where does that leave me, Maria? Hmm? I’ll tell you where. It leaves me looking like what I am, no doubt, a goddam stupid fool to be in love with a woman like you. A fool.’

‘Ernie,’ I said, ‘I wasn’t trying to hurt you, honestly, I wasn’t. I just, I mean, I’m terribly confused today.’

‘Yes, Maria,’ he said. ‘I would say you are confused. Perhaps you forget these things because you simply cannot face remembering them. But, now, let me say this. I don’t think you should be allowed to forget them. You know the maxim: those who cannot remember history are condemned to repeat it? Do you really want to repeat your life, do you?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘No.’

‘All righty. Then I will tell you what happened that evening. Let’s see.’ And he began to talk. After a minute, Terence re-entered the dining-room and sat down again at the table. But Ernie paid no attention. He had begun his tale. He was the Ancient Mariner; he fixed us with drunken eye. We were captive.

‘Do you remember the beginning of that night, Maria? Do you remember I was sitting in the downstairs bar of the Tour Eiffel with Hat? It was about eight in the evening and we’d been there about two hours and old Hat was getting stoned. I’d been helping him on a story, doing the leg work on it, yes, and anyway, there we were, Hat and I, shooting the breeze at the bar when who walked in but the one person in the world who can make my heart stop. You just stood there in the doorway, looking at us, not saying anything and Hat looked over and saw you. I remember he said, very offhand, ‘Hello, there. Join us, won’t you?’ but you ignored that and walked past us and sat down at a table in the corner of the room. And Hat turned to me and went on talking in that high voice of his, but I couldn’t keep up my end of the conversation, Maria, not with you there. I mean, any time I’m in the same room with you – even now – I feel so excited, I have, well, I feel sort of breathless, you know?’

‘Oh, Ernie, for goodness sake.’

‘No, really, I mean it.’

‘All right, you mean it,’ I said. ‘But, please, can’t we talk about something else?’

‘Have some more wine,’ Terence said, rising, going to the sideboard for another bottle, but, as he went past me, he gave me an odd sidelong look which made my heart begin to race again. What must he be thinking, did he think there was something between me and this damn Ernie? Angry and afraid, wishing that my heart would quiet down, I turned to Ernie and, oh God, Ernie was crying. Tears were in his eyes, childish tears, a childish grief, unconcealed, unashamed.

Behind me at the sideboard, I heard a plopping sound, as Terence pulled the cork from a bottle of wine. And in the silence of the moment which followed, we both heard Ernie sob. It was awful.

‘What’s wrong, Ernie?’ I asked, foolishly. ‘Aren’t you feeling well?’

‘I-I-I –’ he began, but could not go on, relapsing into his harsh sobbing.

‘Look,’ I said, trying to sound cheerful, ‘let’s you and I talk about this some other time. After all,’ I said, with a false laugh, ‘poor Terence has had enough of my former life told him by me, I mean, enough to last him a lifetime.’

Ernie, still sobbing, swivelled around in his chair, caught his breath audibly, stared up at Terence with naked tear-wet face, Terence who, stiff with embarrassment, came forward from the sideboard and hastily poured great dollops of wine in our three glasses. ‘But Terence seems,’ Ernie began, ‘I mean he seems a nice guy. And if he wouldn’t mind too much, I’d like to recall that night for Maria, I mean to get it off my chest, as they say. I feel it would be a great help – if Terence doesn’t mind too much?’

‘I don’t mind,’ Terence said, in a rush of embarrassment.

‘Well, thank you.’ Ernie took a wad of yellow Kleenex from his pants pocket, blew his nose, seeming to get a hold of himself. Uneasily, Tee sat down, putting the bottle of wine on the table, next to Ernie, then looking over at me with a look which tried to make a joke of all this. Of course, it wasn’t a joke and he knew it, but his look calmed me a bit. At least, he was on my side.

‘So,’ Ernie said. ‘To go back to that evening.’ He nodded, leaned forward, then nodded again, as though he had just found his place in a book he had been reading. ‘Anyway, I think, he, I mean Hat, had a date with you and he’d forgotten. And you guessed where you might find him. Right?’

I nodded. It wasn’t hard to know where to find Hat in those days.

‘Anyway, there you were, Maria, sitting in a corner of the Tour Eiffel bar, and there was Hat, talking to me. A waiter went over to get your order and then came back to us at the bar. And said to me, ‘Excuse me, sir, but that lady wishes to speak to you.’ And, of course, I thought the waiter had made a mistake, so I turned to Hat and said, ‘She means you.’ But the waiter said, ‘No, sir. You.’ And pointed to me and I looked back at you, Maria, and you nodded, yes, so I went over to you and, remember, you asked me to buy you a drink? And, by golly, I did, I sat right down beside you and ordered and there we were, chatting away, just the two of us, my gosh, me and my dream girl.’

‘A-hem,’ said Terence, grinning at me. ‘Let’s have some coffee, shall we?’

‘I’ll get it,’ I said, jumping up, but Ernie looked at me. ‘Please?’ he said. Terence gestured to me to sit and, defeated, I sat while Ernie went on with his tale. ‘So, anyway,’ he said. ‘The waiter brought our drinks and there we were, Maria, sitting together at the table in the corner and just as you raised your glass and said “Cheers”, old Hat got down off his barstool and weaved across the room. I can still see him standing over us, staring down at us. He looked at me, then at you, and he said to you, “Haven’t you made a mistake? I thought I was your dinner date?” And you said, “No, I’m going to ask Ernie if he’ll buy me dinner. He’s taken me out lots of times.”

‘ “When?” said Hat.

‘ “When you were running around Europe this summer.”

‘And when you said that, Maria, Hat glared at us, remember?’

‘I’ve told you, Ernie, I don’t remember.’

‘But, you must remember that. Those mad black eyes that Hat had. Glaring at us, I’ll never forget it.’

I looked over at Tee who sat, head down, staring at the place mat.

‘Yes,’ Ernie said. ‘I used to be afraid of Hat, you know. Anyway, he looked at us and then he said, “Who’d believe it? May-ree-and her-True-Love, Mary’s little True-Love,” you know, sort of singing it, sneering, you know. And you just got up, oh, you were terrific, Maria, you got up and picked up your gin and tonic and you upended it over his head. Oh, oh, you should have seen that, Terence, the gin and tonic running through Hat’s hair and down his face and Maria here said to him, “Sober up,” and went right past him and walked out and I went after her and then the waiter ran up the stairs after us, so I paid the bill and as I paid the tab I could see old Hat still standing there by the table and he was towelling his wet hair off with a waiter’s napkin. I suppose it was funny, I suppose you could call it comic, but you know, Maria, it wasn’t funny to me, because all my life people have made fun of me and if you’re called Ernest Truelove, what else can you expect?

‘But that night, you, Maria, you made up for all of that. Yes, and we went to dinner, I remember we ate in the La Salle Hotel, the old downstairs room with checked tablecloths, it isn’t even there any more, and we had wine and dinner and talked a lot and I remember realizing that you were very emotional about what had just happened, the row with Hat, and because of that the drinks sort of hit you. Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that you got high, I guess, while I stayed sober and we went from the La Salle, back to my place, remember, on the mountain, near Beaver Lake, and I broke out a bottle of Napoleon brandy that Sally had brought me back from the duty-free shop on her trip to Europe and we settled down to some serious drinking then. Gosh, I guess you don’t remember that, but all of a sudden, Maria, you stopped talking for a while and sat there and then you said it was a mistake, this idea of your marrying Hat Bell, that you were unlucky to yourself and unlucky for other people as well and that your father had come to a bad end, or something, and that you would too.

‘You see how well I remember it, Maria, yes, I can see you sitting there on my rug, sitting at that picture window I have that looks out on a view of Montreal, all the lights lit below us and you talking and me sitting opposite you, listening to you and the lights began to go out as the dawn came into the room. Terence, maybe you’ll understand it better than Maria, here, because Maria doesn’t even remember it, she says she doesn’t, but, anyway, it was dawn and she’d just finished telling me she wasn’t at all sure she should marry Hat Bell, that she could never make anybody happy – anyway, suddenly I got all my courage up and I said to her, “Maria,” I said, “if you married me, I wouldn’t care if you made me happy. Just being near you would be more happiness than I could ever hope for. Because I love you, Maria, I really do love you, I love you the way no one else loves you. I mean unselfishly – unselfishly. Why, listen,” I said, “if you don’t want to marry Hat Bell and you want to get away – to Europe, say – I’ll give you, say, two-thirds of my salary, no strings attached, no questions asked, and you just go away for a year, or for as long as you like.”

‘And, golly, you’d better believe it, Maria, when I said that in the dawn, years ago, I meant it, I meant every word of it, I still mean it, come to think of it, for if you love someone, really love them, it doesn’t matter what they’ve done or will do, it doesn’t matter about their goodness or badness, or what sort of person they are, for if you say you would kill for them or be killed for them, then what does good or evil mean?’

‘That’s nonsense, Ernie,’ I began, but he held up his large hand as though to silence me, then turned to Terence and said, ‘No, I’ll bet Terence knows what I mean. Anyway, as I was saying, it was dawn that morning and I’d made this declaration to you and we were sitting facing each other on my rug and suddenly you leaned towards me, Maria, your eyes shut, your face tilted up as though waiting for a kiss, and I remember how I felt, it’s far too intimate to describe in front of a third person, but, anyway, we kissed each other, and I’ll never forget that moment when I kissed you, Maria, I’ll remember it all my life. I’m sorry, I know I’m out of line, but I just want to tell you one thing. Just one thing. And that is: I would live my life over again just for the one moment, yes, I’d put up with my childhood and my name and people making fun of me, nobody really liking me, yes, and the worst of it is that I don’t blame people for not liking me, because even I despise people like me and I know in my heart that I’m not like Terence, although I want to be, I know in my heart that everything I’ve ever done or ever will do will somehow be third-rate, yes, even my novel I’m writing, the book I have such dreams for, yes.’

His blind eyes, bloodshot from tears, from drinking, sought me as though he waited for me to say something. I sat stiff and I controlled my trembling: but my heart frightened me. I said, ‘Have you finished?’

‘Yes, I have finished, at least I guess I have. I guess that’s it, that’s all, that’s my big story. Boring, isn’t it? I know. What I don’t know is why I inflicted it on you, on both of you, for really, I guess, its importance is all in my mind, you don’t even remember it, Maria. You were kind of high at the time and it was just a kiss, nothing happened, except that you said you were fond of me –’

‘Look,’ Terence said, ‘you’ve finished this story, haven’t you?’

There, in the dining-room, amid the wreck of dinner glasses, dishes, wine bottles, there settled on all three of us an instant of total immobility, as though the film of our lives had jammed. We sat, frozen in stop frame, until, suddenly, Ernie’s head jerked forward and he turned to me, his face screwed up in a painful parody of a boy’s embarrassed grin. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I guess I have finished. Eh, Maria? Golly, I’ve gone and done it again. Made a fool of myself, imposed on people’s kindness, irritated the people I most want to be friends with. You and Terence. Golly.’

Having castigated himself, he, like all those people who are quick to apologize, considered himself at once forgiven. He grinned again and said, ‘What a horse’s ass I am. I’ll bet that’s what you’re thinking?’

Terence, embarrassed and angry, shook his head and stood up. ‘Let’s go inside and have a brandy.’

I said I would get coffee and I remember that, in the kitchen, pouring water into the Melitta filter, hearing Terence open the sideboard to get brandy glasses, I felt my heart again, so loud and hard inside me that I wondered, my God, what if it’s not nerves, what if there is something wrong with me, what if it’s a rheumatic heart or something like that I don’t even know about, what if I topple over here in the kitchen and die, it would serve Ernie right, coming in here and starting up all this fuss and nonsense, I suppose I did use him that night long ago, because I wanted to get back at Hat, but it shows you, if you use people you pay for it, as tonight I am paying, years later, for that one silly kiss I gave Ernie. And, as I stood there in the kitchen, getting the coffee, I heard Ernie’s loud voice say, ‘No, I thought, maybe at the funeral. I was expecting her, I guess, not you. I thought she’d probably come up on her own.’

‘She didn’t know anything about it,’ Tee’s voice said.

‘But what about my telegrams? I sent her a telegram.’

‘Oh?’

‘Yes, advising her. You know I was sharing my apartment with Hat at the time he died.’

‘I didn’t know that,’ Tee’s voice said.

‘Yes, we were very close in the last year or two. I was his best friend, poor guy. I made all the funeral arrangements, notified his family, notified everybody. And Maria. I definitely remember sending her the wire.’

Tee muttered something I didn’t catch. My hands shook so I had to put the kettle down and sit down. I put the kettle on the kitchen table. I sat at the kitchen table and laid my cheek against the table’s wooden surface and, when I did, my eyes were reflected in the aluminium surface of the kettle beside me, my eyes were like my father’s dead eyes, Hat’s dead eyes, and, in nightmare, I saw Mama dead too, lying now on the kitchen floor in Butchersville, the wind from under the door jamb blowing her grey hair into her dead staring eyes –

‘Mary, what’s the matter? Are you sick?’

Tee was at the kitchen door. He came to me, sat on the chair with me, put his arm around me and felt me tremble, felt me shake, saw the state I was in, but I wasn’t afraid of him any more, he was alive, he was life, not death. I held him and I thought: he is my saviour, he restoreth my soul. I heard him ask again what was wrong and all the unreasoning, unreasonable emotions of my state spilled out beyond my control and I held him, kissed him, weeping, saying, ‘Tee, Tee, I love you, please love me?’

‘Of course. Of course. I do.’

‘And that damn Ernie,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry I asked him, but please, I don’t want to talk about deaths or funerals, about Hat, you know, I just don’t feel up to it.’

Tee got up, shut the kitchen door, then said, ‘Look, I’ll say you’re sick, you have a sick headache or something. You don’t have to put up with that bloody man. He’s bonkers. Now don’t worry, you’re fine, you’ll be fine. Come on, we’ll go in there and you’ll say good night to him and then I’ll have a coffee with him and get rid of him.’

‘But I can’t do that, I can’t leave you.’

‘You can and you will,’ Tee said. ‘Come on, now.’

He took my arm and opened the kitchen door and we went in to meet Ernie, who turned from the window, brandy glass in hand, and I had been right, he did wear glasses, for, as he turned to face us, he whipped off a pair with that curious, vain, guilty look of a person who is trying to conceal the fact that he wears glasses. He shut the hinges with a clack, stuffed the glasses in the side pocket of his navy blazer, advancing on us, showing his teeth in a false smile. ‘We-ell, arm-in-arm, the perfect picture of young love. I will say you two make a handsome couple. Yes, I’d say that.’

‘I’m afraid Mary’s not feeling well,’ Tee said. ‘She has a sort of sick headache and I’ve convinced her we wouldn’t mind if she simply says good night and climbs into bed with a couple of aspirins. Don’t you agree?’

‘A sick headache,’ Ernie said. ‘Well, that’s, ah, yes, that’s bad. I’m sorry.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘But I’m afraid I’m not much company for anyone when I’m feeling like this.’

‘It’s all right, don’t worry, I’m sure Ernie understands,’ Tee said, hastily.

‘Of course, of course,’ Ernie boomed. ‘Now you go on to bed. Gee, it was great seeing you again, Maria, just great, good of you to invite me, it just about made my whole trip to New York and say, listen, I’m sorry if I went on too much about the past, etcetera, but I guess you know now that you’re on my mind most of the time. Anyway, I mustn’t keep you standing there with that splitting headache, I’ll just say good night and push on now.’

‘No need to rush off,’ Terence said to him. ‘Stay and have a nightcap with me. I believe Mary made coffee.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It’s all made.’

‘No, no, I really must go, I’ve imposed quite enough.’

‘Well . . .’ Tee said, giving in.

‘Yes, I must,’ Ernie said again.

‘Well, in that case,’ Tee said. ‘Yes, and it was, ah, yes, nice meeting you.’

By that time, Tee, in some mysterious way, had stage-managed Ernie out of the living-room and into the hall and Ernie had picked his horrible brown cocoa straw hat off the captain’s chest by the front door. My heart stopped being so loud. My tremor diminished. ‘Yes, and nice meeting you,’ Ernie was saying to Tee. ‘As you know, I told you, I’m one of your greatest fans. Yes, indeed.’

‘Goodbye, Ernie,’ I said. ‘And take care.’

‘Goodbye, Maria. And don’t forget you promised to give me a ring when you come to Montreal.’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Goodbye, then.’

‘Goodbye, Ernie,’ Tee said, opening the apartment door.

‘Oh. One thing.’ Ernie paused by the captain’s chest, hat in hand, turning back to me. ‘Just for curiosity’s sake, I mean, I was talking to Terence just now and it came up, I mean about a telegram I sent you telling you about Hat’s death. Apparently, you never received it?’

I shook my head. Down Tilt.

‘Then, I mean, did you get the letter, the one I sent on a few days later?’

‘What letter?’

‘A letter Hat wrote to you the afternoon of his death.’

‘A letter?’ I said, dumbly.

‘Yes, he spent the afternoon writing it.’

‘But what letter, I never got any letter.’

‘Well,’ said Ernie, ‘I mailed it out to you. It was addressed to you, but there were no stamps on it. So, when I sent you the telegram telling you Hat was dead, I held on to the letter, thinking I’d, ah, I’d give it to you when you came up to Montreal for the funeral. Then, when you didn’t come, I mailed it on to you, here in New York.’

‘Where did you mail it to, what address?’

‘To, ah, to Gramercy Park.’

‘You sent the telegram there too?’ Terence asked.

‘Yes.’

‘Well, that explains it,’ Terence said. ‘We weren’t living at Gramercy Park then. We moved here over a year ago.’

‘But the letter,’ I said. ‘I mean, why wasn’t it forwarded, what happened to it?’

‘I don’t know,’ Terence said.

‘Gee.’ Ernie shook his head. ‘You never got it? Gee, I often wondered about that letter, I even thought of getting in touch with you about it. At the inquest, you know, they asked if Hat left any message and I said “no”, because, strictly speaking, that wasn’t a message, was it?’

Through the opened front door of the apartment I could see one of the neighbours, an old lady with a wen on her forehead, passing down towards the elevator, listening in. I leaned over, took Ernie’s sleeve, drew him back into the apartment hall and shut the door. ‘Now,’ I said. ‘What message? What inquest?’

‘Darling, take it easy,’ Terence said. ‘Relax, it’s all right, calm down.’

‘What inquest?’

‘Well, there was an inquest,’ Ernie said. ‘He was under psychiatric care during those last months.’

‘With Angus McMurtry? Dr McMurtry?’

‘Yes, your friend, wasn’t he?’ Ernie said. ‘He testified at the inquest, I remember he said Hat was a manic-depressive. There was the question of whether it was suicide or an accident.’

‘Suicide?’ I must have been too loud or quavery, for Tee patted my arm as if to quiet me.

‘Yes, the autopsy showed he died of a combination of barbiturates and alcohol. He started drinking again after you left, you know. And then, after a couple of bad bouts, he went back to this Dr McMurtry, and things went better for a while. He stopped drinking. But, about a week before he died, I noticed he’d begun nipping at the bottle again. And just about that time, he began talking about you. That was always a bad sign. Anyway, that Saturday afternoon, I was watching the Grey Cup game on television and he, ah, he didn’t come in to watch and that was funny, he was a football fan, as you know, but, anyway, when I went out to the kitchen to get me a beer, there he was sitting at the kitchen table with his portable and a bottle of Scotch and he’d written sheets and sheets of typescript pages, and, while I got the beer, he addressed an envelope and folded all the sheets and stuffed them in and he said, “I want to send this to New York airmail, how much do you think it will be?” Well, I have a little postage scale in my room so I took the letter and weighed it and we didn’t have enough stamps in the apartment so he said, “Look, if I don’t get to the office on Monday morning, will you promise me you’ll mail this? It’s important.” Well, of course, when I’d weighed it, I’d glanced at the address and seen it was addressed to you so I said something comical like, “I see you’re writing to my dream girl again,” but he just gave me a sour look, you know, and took up the Scotch bottle and went into the living-room and asked how the game was going. And that was it, we watched the end of the game together. I was going out to a dinner party later, it was Saturday night, you know, Saturday night in Toronto, so I showered and dressed and when I was leaving, about seven or so, Hat was still sitting at the TV set and I noticed he’d pretty well killed the bottle, so I said to him, “Look,” I said. “There’s all kinds of food in the fridge, you’d better eat some of it if you want to stay in shape.” He looked up at me and he said, “Goodbye, Ernie. Enjoy yourself.” And that was it. I went out and came back late and went to bed and it wasn’t until next morning, the Sunday, I woke up about noon and the door of his bedroom was still shut so when I made coffee I thought I’d bring him a cup to wake him up and when I went in, there he was on the bed, lying on his stomach –’

‘All right,’ Terence said, ‘let’s skip the details.’

‘Oh. Yes, gee, sorry, Maria.’

‘And there was an inquest?’ I asked.

‘Yes, like I told you. Apparently, he’d gone to bed sloshed and he took some sleeping pills, and then probably woke and took some more. You know, when he was drunk, he’d forget what he’d taken. Anyway, it was an overdose. They found about fifteen pills in his stomach. That was what did it.’

‘Oh, Mary,’ Terence said, for I was trembling. I must have looked as though I was about to keel over. Terence led me back into the living-room and sat me down on the sofa. Ernie came and stood at the door of the living-room. I remember looking up at Ernie, at that smug, sneaky face and I thought, was the letter sealed or did he read it, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he did.

‘Was the letter sealed, I mean the letter to me?’

‘Sure, gosh, yes, of course. All I did was put stamps on it.’

I looked at Terence, who sat beside me on the sofa, his arm around me. ‘Tee, what if the letter is still there, I mean at the Gramercy Park address?’

‘No, no,’ Terence said. ‘The mail has all been forwarded to us. They still send it on, even the junk mail.’

‘Was there a return address on the letter?’ I asked Ernie.

‘I don’t remember, ah, I don’t think so.’

‘Then, maybe the letter’s in the Dead Letter Office?’ I said.

‘Hardly.’ Ernie shook his head. ‘No, I happen to know that after six months the post office destroys them.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Look, Mary,’ Terence said. ‘I don’t want to make an issue of this, but the point is, Hat is dead, this letter didn’t exist for you until Ernie brought it up. I very much doubt that you could ever find it now and, even if you did, what good would it do to read it?’

‘Well, it might answer the question of suicide, for one thing,’ Ernie said.

‘And what good will that do anybody? He’s dead, isn’t he?’

‘It would set my mind at rest,’ Ernie said.

‘And Mary’s mind? What if the letter’s a diatribe against her? You were telling us earlier that nobody loves Mary the way you do, well if you love her so much, Mister Truelove, I don’t know why you’re so anxious that she read a letter which might hurt her.’

‘Touché,’ Ernie said, loudly. ‘Yes, touché. And I notice you’re no different from anybody else, Terence, despite the fact that you’re supposed to be a creative and sensitive person. You couldn’t resist getting that dig in about my name, could you?’

‘You wet idiot,’ Terence said. ‘Who cares about you or your name?’

‘Please,’ I said. ‘Please, just don’t fight.’

‘I’m sorry, darling,’ Terence said, but Ernie wasn’t having any of that, he was all heavy breathing and drunk stare, his head lowering as though he were going to charge. ‘Oh, yes, let’s not fight,’ he mimicked me. ‘Yes, let’s shove everything under the rug and forget it. Yes, Maria, that’s your style, all right.’

Terence stood up, suddenly. Ernie at once backed off, hunching his shoulders in a defensive boxer’s stance. ‘Terence,’ I said. I was hysterical. ‘For God’s sake,’ I said.

‘All right,’ Terence said. ‘But he’d better leave.’

‘Yes, get rid of me,’ Ernie jeered. ‘It’s painful to be reminded, isn’t it?’

‘Out,’ Terence said. He moved on Ernie and, at that moment, the tension inside me, my hammering heart, my shaking, my wanting to scream, to weep, all of that, all of what I call Mad Twin exploded in me and I (or Mad Twin) got up, pushed myself between the two men, pushing Terence away, taking hold of Ernie Truelove by the front of his blazer and shaking him, yes, shaking him hard, while a voice I did not know as mine shouted out, ‘What do you mean, my style, what am I to be reminded of? Did you read Hat’s letter or didn’t you?’

And as I shouted this at Ernie, Terence had taken hold of me and was pulling me away, saying, ‘Mary, come on, darling, come on, get a hold of yourself, darling.’

‘No, no, I want to know; he’s just accused me of causing somebody’s death, he’s just said it was suicide. Well, was it?’

‘Nobody knows, it was probably an accident,’ Terence said.

But Mad Twin would not be calmed. ‘All right, but what about this letter, what did it say? I bet he knows, I’m sure he read it before he mailed it, he’s the sort who would read it, you did read it, didn’t you?’

Ernie: his head jerked up as though I had aimed a blow at him. His stare: drunken, dulled, yet frightened by my hysteria. ‘Golly, Maria. Honest. Cross my heart, I didn’t.’

‘Are you sure? Listen, I’d rather you had, I mean, I want to know.’

‘Word of honour, Maria, I never read it.’

‘But it was a long letter, you know that much? Sheets and sheets, you said.’

‘Yes, it was.’

‘Well, then, what do you think was in it? What did he say about me in those months, what did he say at the end?’

‘Do you really think you should go on with this?’ Terence asked.

‘I have to, I have to know, I mean was it suicide, or wasn’t it? Was it because of my leaving him, or what? I’ve got the rest of my life to worry about this.’

‘Well, if you really want to know?’ Ernie said, and stopped.

‘Yes, I do, go on.’

‘Well, he used to say, I mean, to complain that you never wrote to him.’

‘But why should I? We were divorced.’

‘I know, golly, it doesn’t make sense, I used to tell him that myself. But he kept thinking he would hear from you.’

‘That’s ridiculous.’

‘I know, Maria, but he, well, look, you’d better believe it, he was a bit odd there at the end. I mean – oh – about ten days before he died, he got this crazy idea that you were in town. You weren’t, were you?’

‘In Montreal? Of course not.’

‘Well, Hat thought so. We phoned all the hotels and then we decided you were perhaps staying with some friends.’

‘We decided? What do you mean?’

‘Well, gee, you know, I love you too, I was interested too. And, besides, golly, well I always did old Hat’s research for him.’

‘Oh God,’ I said and laughed. I suppose I was hysterical.

‘Anyway,’ Ernie said. ‘After I’d phoned and asked around I was sure Hat was wrong and I told him so. But he insisted he’d seen you coming out of the Ritz Hotel a few days before. And then – it was on the Thursday – a few days before he died – I came home one evening after work, it was about six o’clock and I went up the stairs and got out my key to open the front door and as I did I heard Hat’s voice saying from inside the apartment, “Come in, Maria.” It was spooky. I opened the door with my key and there was Hat, sitting in a chair facing the door, staring at me.’

‘Drunk, I should imagine,’ Tee said.

‘No. And you’ve never seen anybody look so disappointed. And he said to me, “She was here today. Maria was here.” ’

‘But that’s nonsense,’ I said. ‘He must have been drunk.’

‘No, wait. Here’s what he said. That morning, Thursday morning, he said he was standing in the living-room of the apartment, looking out the window. He used to do that a lot when he was depressed. He’d stand there in the living-room looking through the slats of the venetian blinds. He could see, but he couldn’t be seen. The street is at window level, do you remember, Maria?’

‘No,’ I said.

‘Anyway, he was looking out the window that morning when, suddenly, he saw you coming up the street. He swore it was you, although I told him he must have made a mistake. But he said, “No, it was Maria, she was only thirty feet away. I was staring right at her through the blind. She checked the number of the building, then turned and came in and I heard her footsteps on the little flight of stairs out there. I heard her move right up to the apartment door and then she stopped. It was very quiet. I knew she was hesitating and so I said, just as I did now, ‘Come in, Maria.’ And suddenly, I heard her footsteps running downstairs again. So I opened the apartment door but she was already out of the building. I ran to the street entrance, but she had disappeared. She was nervous, I suppose. I’d be nervous too, if I was coming back to somebody.” ’

‘He thought I was coming back to him?’

‘Yes. And he said, “It’s all right, I’m expecting her any moment. I’ve been waiting here ever since.” And there he was, he’d been sitting in that chair all day, waiting.’

‘Jesus,’ Tee said.

‘And listen to this,’ Ernie said. ‘Hat sat all night in that chair, waiting for you. And all the next day, the Friday. And all Friday night. Oh, it was spooky, all right. I was worried, you know. And then, on the Saturday morning, when I got up, there he was still sitting in the chair, but now there was a change. He had a bottle of Scotch beside him and he’d had a couple of belts. And then, around noon that Saturday, he suddenly got up out of the chair and went into his room and came out with the bottle and his portable and sat down at the kitchen table. And said to me, “Well, that’s it, I guess. She decided against coming back to me. She’s left town and I’ll never see her again.” And he started to type. And then, later that afternoon, as I told you, I came into the kitchen again for a beer and there he was finishing all those sheets and I asked was he working and he said no, he’d been writing you a letter. And, honestly, Maria, this is what he said, what he really said. He said, “You see, I think there are a few things that girl should know. I mean this is the end for me. I’ve given up. I’ll never see her again. So I wrote her.” He held up all those sheets. “As you can see,” he said, “I had quite a few thoughts to get off my mind.” And then he sealed and addressed the envelope and I weighed it, as I told you, and promised to mail it for him on the Monday.’

‘Jesus,’ Terence said again.

‘And that’s the whole story, Maria. I mean, the letter had something to do with this idea he had that you’d been in Montreal, come right to the flat, then decided not to see him. And that’s it, that’s all I know.’

‘As you say,’ Tee said, ‘that’s it.’ I saw him give Ernie a meaningful look and then he said, ‘Could I see you a moment?’ They both went out into the front hall and I heard them whisper male whispers about me. Then they came back, Ernie first, Ernie saying, ‘Well, gee, I really must be getting along now. Listen, and thanks for dinner and everything. And, ah, I’m sorry about the letter, golly, Maria, as I said there’s nothing I wouldn’t do to prevent, I mean I’d never want to see you hurt or anything. As Terence here says, and he’s right, all that is water under the bridge, no sense you worrying about it now.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Yes. Well, good night, Ernie.’

‘Good night. Sorry I got out of line.’

‘That’s all right, you didn’t.’

Terence shook hands with Ernie and we all went back into the front hall. Ernie took my hand between his large damp palms and pressed it, staring at me with blind eyes. ‘Good night, dear,’ he said.

I withdrew my hand. Terence handed him his cocoa straw hat, then held open the apartment door. Ernie put the hat on his head, shifted the angle to make sure it was secure, then, with a clumsy, half-humble bow to us both, turned and walked off towards the elevator. In my last sight of him, as Terence closed our door, he reached furtively in his side pocket for the glasses he had concealed, put them on, then moved forward more confidently, as though restored to sight.

 

‘I think you need a drink,’ Terence said, turning to me, holding me. I pressed my face against his coat and heard my heart beat, loud. I felt he must hear it too, but I said, ‘No, not a drink. I’m all right.’ I said I had better do the dishes and so Tee said he would help me and I remember carrying dishes in from the dining-room and putting detergent in the dishwasher while Terence said he thought Ernie wasn’t normal, there was something mad about him and I remember talking about Ernie for a bit, but in my mind was that picture of Hat, in Montreal, half-mad, standing in Ernie’s living-room, peering through the slats of the venetian blind at some girl he imagined was me come back to him at last. And then sitting in that chair, waiting, waiting, staring at the front door while it got dark, he sat there staring at that door all night as my father dead in the Park Plaza stared at the door, and I thought I saw Mama dead too, lying now on the kitchen floor in Butchersville, the wind from under the door jamb blowing her grey hair into her dead, staring eyes.

‘Mary, are you all right?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Would you like to lie down? I’ll put these dishes through and make some coffee. Lie down for a few minutes and I’ll bring you a cup.’

I said yes I would and got up and went into the bedroom. In the bedroom I put on all the lights and sat on the bed and thought about that long letter Hat had written. He wrote the letter to rebuke me, then killed himself to give point to his rebuke. Yet, the letter never reached me. Until today, I did not even know he was a suicide. Nor will I ever know, for sure. Yet in his bungling, didn’t he achieve the most subtle revenge of all? The letter was probably a re-hash of the reproaches he shouted at me in our last days together. But I cannot be sure: I do not know what it said. Not knowing is the worst, it is those other things I do not know, like the name and the face of the woman who was in bed with my father the afternoon he died, it is those things I will never know, they are what frighten me and it is because of them that I can no longer find my way back to the Mary Dunne I was in my schooldays, to that Mary Phelan who giggled and wept in the Blodgetts’ bed-sitter, or to that girl who laughed long ago in a winter street when Hat cried, ‘Mange la merde,’ when such things were funny, when I was Mary Bell. I will not even be able to go back to today when I am Mary Lavery, for today was a warning, a beginning, I mean forgetting my name, it was like forgetting my name that day, long ago, in Juarez, I will forget again, I will forget more often, it will happen to me every day and perhaps every hour, and as I sat on my bed and thought of that, the dooms came down, the Juarez dooms.

Terence came in and saw me. ‘What is it?’ he asked, but I could not tell him. ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I’m down, I feel down.’

He came and lay beside me on the bed and held me, but it did not help. I felt the dooms, I felt as though I had been plugged in to some strange electric current and that current ran through me and made me tremble. It was the dooms, the Juarez dooms and this time I knew it would never go away, I would tremble and shake for the rest of my days. And now that it had come upon me, Terence would leave me, the doctors would advise it, they would lock me up, and so I began to weep and Tee kissed me and said, ‘Listen, darling, listen, the best thing to do about all that is to forget it. You know the way Hat drank, he wouldn’t know what he was doing and besides, even if it were suicide, it had nothing to do with you. Whatever was wrong with him was wrong, long before you met him.’

‘Angus said that too,’ I said. I felt like someone making conversation.

‘Angus who?’

‘McMurtry, the psychiatrist.’

‘What did he say?’

‘Oh, it was long ago, he told me whatever was wrong with Hat had something to do with his family – his parents.’

‘Well,’ said Tee. ‘You see. Now, try to forget it.’

‘It’s not that. It’s me,’ I said. ‘I’m afraid and I don’t know why. I think something’s happening to my mind.’

‘Nonsense,’ Tee said.

And the phone rang. We lay and listened, ‘Don’t go,’ I told Tee. ‘It’s him again, it’s Ernie. Or Janice Sloane. Or somebody else I don’t want to speak to.’

‘No, it’s Bowen for me. I’ll be back in a moment.’ I lay and did not weep but my heart frightened me, the electric current ran in my body: it made me tremble; it would not go away; it was here to stay.

‘It’s for you, love,’ Tee called from the living-room. ‘Your mother.’

My mother has cancer, a rectal lump, and when they do the operation, they will simply open her up, look at what is there, sew her up again, and send her home to die. In the Juarez dooms, all things are black. In the Juarez dooms, fear comes like vomit in my throat and the electric current runs in my body, making my heart thump and my hands shake and when I picked up the receiver and said ‘Hello’, my mother knew at once.

‘Mary, it’s me. How are you, are you all right?’

‘Sure. I’m fine,’ said some recording tape within me.

‘You don’t sound fine. Are you ill?’

‘I’m fine, Mama. I got your letter today.’

Her voice, far away in Butchersville, ignoring what I’d said. ‘Listen, Mary, were you calling me?’

‘Yes.’

‘Ah, I thought it was you. Mrs Daly at the phone office said it was New York, so it’s Mary, I said to myself, I hope she’s all right, why would she call? So, anyway, I thought I’d better call you back. What is it, dear, is there anything I can do for you?’

‘Is there anything I can do for you?’ I asked. ‘I mean about the hospital?’

‘The hospital?’

‘Your letter,’ I said. ‘About that lump of yours. How do you feel, are you worried about it?’

‘So that’s why you called. Of course, why didn’t I think of that? Oh Lord. I didn’t mean to scare you.’ And she laughed.

‘What are you laughing about?’

‘I forgot what a worrier you are, dear. Now, don’t you be upsetting yourself, sure it’s only a minor thing, it’s not much more than having a boil lanced.’

‘Still,’ I said. ‘There’ll be an anaesthetic. You might feel sick after it. Why don’t you let me come up and take care of you for a few days?’

‘Oh, Mary dear.’ And I heard my mother laugh again. ‘Ah, you’re sweet,’ she said. ‘And I always love to see you. But why waste a lot of money just for a day or two? Why not come up and bring, ah, Terence. Come up and stay a while, when the weather’s a bit better?’

‘But I wasn’t talking about a holiday,’ I said.

‘I know, dear, I know. You’re worrying about it being cancer, aren’t you?’

‘Are you?’ I said.

‘Well, I am, a wee bit.’

‘Then maybe you’d like me to be there?’

‘And have you worrying for the two of us?’ my mother said. ‘Is that it?’

‘Oh, Mama, I’m not worried. It’ll be all right.’

‘Well, of course it will.’ Her voice, the voice of my childhood, that voice which said a kiss would make the hurt all better. ‘Yes, of course, it’ll be all right,’ my mother’s voice said. ‘Why, Dr McLarnon says this sort of lump is common as carrots in women of my age. Oh, of course, I know it could be serious, I’m not daft. But I’ll say my prayers and put myself in God’s hands. That’s all any of us can do.’

God: I see Jesus, effeminate and sanctimonious; he wears a wispy brown beard and a white nightgown. He holds his hands up, palm outward, as though stopping traffic. He stops me. When his name comes up in our conversations, my mother and I become strangers in a darkness, far away from contact with each other; strangers on a long distance wire.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I suppose so.’

‘Tell you what, Mary. I’ll get Dick to phone you the minute he gets the results. All right?’

‘All right.’ I did not tell her I’d already spoken to Dick.

‘So, don’t worry,’ my mother said. And then, ‘How are you, yourself? You sound a bit down in the dumps.’

‘I am, a bit,’ I said. ‘But it will pass. I hope.’

‘Of course it will. And, Mary?’

‘Three minutes,’ an operator said.

‘All right, operator,’ my mother said. ‘We’re just finishing.’

‘Mama, what was it you were going to ask me?’

‘It doesn’t matter, it was nothing,’ my mother said in a rushed voice. All she could think of now was that the three minutes was up. ‘Good night, dear. We’ll keep in touch.’

‘Mama?’ I said. ‘Mama? I want to ask you something. Do you think I’ve changed much in these last years?’

Again, she laughed. ‘You haven’t changed at all, you’re still talking over the time limit.’

‘No, seriously.’

‘Look,’ said my mother. ‘Good night, now. You haven’t changed for me. You’re my daughter, you’ll always be the same to me. Good night, darling.’

And she hung up.

‘Anything wrong at home?’ Terence asked, coming in from the kitchen with two cups of coffee. I told him about the letter this morning and about my earlier phone call to Dick.

‘Poor you,’ Tee said. ‘What a day you’ve had. No wonder you’re feeling low.’

I looked at him when he said that. Did he know? He sat facing me, smiling, sympathetic, sipping at his coffee. Did he know the Juarez dooms were on me, the electric current dooms which cut me off from everyone else, for in these dooms it is not the world which is at fault, it is me who is at fault, my fault, my fault, my most grievous fault, yet I do not know my fault, the Juarez dooms are not about real things, I do not think about Hat’s suicide, I do not know what is it I have done and so, not knowing, I cannot forgive myself. I know only that I have done wrong, that I am being punished, that I will never be happy again. The greatest happiness would be to be as I was a few hours ago before these dooms came upon me. But that will never be, I will get worse, I will end in a madhouse, a vegetable, smeared in my own excrement, unable even to clean myself and once I think of that I know Terence is the one who will be forced to commit me to the asylum and now I am afraid to be in the same room with him for he will see how mad I have become and I must be cunning and escape so I say to him, ‘Yes, you’re right, I have had a hard day. In fact, I think I should take a hot bath and go to bed, if you wouldn’t mind too much?’

‘Sure,’ he said. ‘Go ahead. I’m going to bed myself in a moment.’ He smiled at me.

So I escaped him.

But not the dooms. Naked in the bathroom, I stood and stared at myself in the full-length mirror. I had run a bath but just as I went to get into the tub I saw myself naked in this mirror. I looked at my face, a mask which looked back at me, at my body which hid what happens inside it, for this is hell and I am in it, the strange current runs in me, it will never turn off, I will get worse, I will lose not only my memory, but my mind and at the end I will be that vegetable squatting on the floor of the asylum’s disturbed ward, unable to say its name, any of its names, for it has forgotten, therefore it is not, it has no name, it cannot even clean itself. And death which frightened me all day, death which brought hints of these dooms, death did not frighten me now, death was quiet graves, Hat’s grave, my father’s grave, stone markers in the snow. I thought of snow as I put on my dressing gown and went out of the bathroom. I thought of the white, light, rubble-filled space, the one I see below, from the kitchen window. I went into the kitchen, but I was quiet, I did not want to disturb Terence. I heard him moving around in the bedroom as I shut the kitchen door. I went to the kitchen window and opened it. I climbed out of the window on to the fire escape. The iron steps of the fire escape were warm against my bare feet. The building next door to ours was torn down some months ago: they are going to put up a new apartment building in the empty space. I looked down at the narrow, dark area way, four storeys below the fire-escape railing, but I was not drawn down to that darkness, I was drawn beyond it, to those strange palisades made of old wooden doors which wreckers erect around these waste lots. The street light shone on the whitish, dusty, brick-rubbled rectangle where that building used to be. I would have to climb up and balance on the fire-escape railing, then jump far out, jumping the ditch of the narrow area way to fall where I wanted to fall, inside the wooden palisades, into that white, light, brick-rubbled rectangle.

I put my hand on the railing. I looked down and, at once, felt giddy. I could not climb up on to the railing. I could not balance up there. I was afraid, very afraid to be out on the fire escape at all, so I ducked back through the kitchen window. I shut the window.

I went into the bedroom. Terence was in bed, half asleep, a book lax in his hand. I got into bed, lying well away from him. The electric current ran within me. I listened as he let the book drop on the floor. He leaned over, his body touching mine. He kissed my cheek.

‘I love you,’ he said.

‘I love you,’ I said.

He reached for the bedside switch. ‘Want the light on?’

‘No.’

He switched off the light. I lay very still wondering why he did not hear my heartbeat. If I was afraid to jump off the fire-escape, then I am more afraid of physical pain than I am of these dooms. If Hat killed himself, it was a stupid, selfish thing to do. Hat was always the actor, always making dramas out of his fairly ordinary problems. And, at the end, so caught up in his self-dramatization that he overplayed his role. But if I make that harsh judgment on Hat, then what was I doing, playacting out there on the fire escape? And what are these dooms of mine but a frightening, unreal play going on inside my head, a play I must sit through and suffer, for if I do not fight them, the dooms will not leave me.

And so, here in the dark, I closed my eyes and went back sixteen years. They were waiting: Mother Marie-Thérèse and the class. She wrote it on the blackboard. Cogito ergo sum. My hand went up. Memento ergo sum. And see, when I put my mind to it, I did manage to remember most of the thoughts, words, and deeds of today, and now I will not panic, these dooms may just be pre-menstrual, I will not over-dramatize my problems, I am not losing my memory, I know who I am, my mother said tonight that I am her daughter and while she lives I will be that, I will not change, I am the daughter of Daniel Malone Dunne and Eileen Martha Ring, I am Mary Patricia Dunne, I was christened that and there is nothing wrong with my heart or with my mind: in a few hours I will begin to bleed, and until then I will hold on, I will remember what Mama told me, I am her daughter, I have not changed, I remember who I am and I say it over and over and over, I am Mary Dunne, I am Mary Dunne, I am Mary Dunne.