A Bird's Eye (5 page)

At this time I was beginning to consider my escape from the family home. I had, I think, about as much sympathy for both my mother and father as an adolescent boy could have. I knew even then that they had never fully embraced the New World, much as they had wanted to escape the Old. Nor had they found a new world in each other. But that did not much mitigate my burning desire to live just about anywhere else. But I had no savings, and while I considered asking my aunt, I had some of my father's stubborn pride and didn't want to succeed on my uncle's money.

In the meantime, I had to find other ways to escape. Slipping out of the house after dark, I had to squeeze out of my small window, grab onto the brick sill next to my own, place a foot at the top of the window just below, and then shimmy down the shaking rainspout. My hands slipped and I fell the last few feet.

“Hey,” Corinne said. She could get out of her house before I could and so was always waiting for me.

“Hey yourself,” I said back. It was hard to see much but her eyes. “What you want to do?”

“I got a couple of hours before my daddy's supposed to be home. He's coming from the Rocky Mountains. We could go to the river, try to find change that fell out of people's pockets doing the hootchy-kootchy.”

“We never found anything last time. I got a piece of Black Jack.” I unwrapped it, bit it in two, and gave her the other half.

She worked it in her mouth. “Hope I don't break a tooth.”

“That wouldn't matter. You got, like, ten extra teeth.” This was my way of hiding the fact that I was always thinking about her face, her mouth, her small round breasts under her shirt.

“I do not,” she said.

“And fangs. Like Dracula.”

“Well, I wouldn't suck your blood. You'd taste bad.”

By now we were already walking down Markham Street, past the small dark houses, a cat slinking in a doorway. The two of us could walk for hours. We'd grow tired, but still we'd keep going, along the Humber River on the west or the Don on the east, up to the streetcar barns where we would look through the windows to see the men with their sparking blowtorches doing repairs.

I said, “Let's go to your aunt and uncle's house, Corinne.”

“Oh, shut up.”

“Why not? You've been to my house.”

“I haven't been
in
your house, have I?”

I didn't have a reply to that.

“You really want to meet my daddy? He won't like you one bit. “

“You said he won't be home for a couple of hours. Anyway, I won't go in. It's just to see where you live, that's all.”

“Why you so interested? Oh, all right. I don't mind. At least I won't have to listen to you go on about it.”

She started walking quickly down Crawford, and with her long legs it was an effort for me to keep up. I smacked her on the back with the flat of my hand and started running, but she caught up in a minute and then we were running together. The only time we stopped was when a police car came sliding along the street and we ducked behind some trash cans.

We got down to King Street, passed Dufferin, and then down Cowan Street. From there I could see the tops of some of the higher buildings on the Exhibition grounds. Only when a train rattled by did I realize we were fifty yards or so from the tracks.

“That's our place,” she said, pointing to a small bungalow set far back from the street. There was a light on in the porch and I could see a figure sitting there. I slowed down, but Corinne grabbed me by the sleeve and we kept going, right up the walk. He was a small man, shorter than Corinne and much darker-skinned, although otherwise she looked like him. He had close-cropped hair and wore eyeglasses and had on a well-worn corduroy jacket. He had a thick book in his hands, and as he got up he put it on the rail.

“Your aunt wanted me to go looking for you. But I said there's no point, I won't find you. So I've been waiting up instead, trying to decide if I'm greatly displeased or
extremely
displeased by your behaviour.”

“I'm sorry, Daddy. What are you reading?”

“You're changing the subject.”

“I'm not. You know I like the books you like.”

“It's
War and Peace
. By a Russian. It's long, but it's good. Who's your friend?”

“His name's Benjamin.”

“Do your folks know you're here, Benjamin?”

I didn't see any advantage in lying to him. “No, sir,” I said.

“I don't know what this age is coming to, the way children don't listen to their elders anymore. You two hungry? Auntie baked an apple rhubarb pie.”

“Yes, Daddy.”

“Come on inside, then. And don't wake up your aunt or uncle.”

Another train went by, making the porch tremble as I went up the stairs behind Corinne. Inside, the house had a very large, bare kitchen, but all the other rooms were small. Her father took a milk bottle out of the very old icebox and cut us generous slices of pie, and while we ate he asked us questions as if he was genuinely curious. The pie was tart and sweet both. It turned Corinne's mouth red, and mine too, I suppose.

With so many people needing to rent out rooms, boarders were not easy to find. Nevertheless, my mother turned down a woman just arrived from Port Arthur on the grounds that we already had a woman boarder and they were far more demanding than men. Three weeks went by before a man offered to take it, but my mother said that he was too feeble and that, if he died in bed, who would pay for the funeral?

At last came a third. His name was Sigismond Eisler. Totally bald but virile-looking and with the bushy eyebrows of a moving-pictures comedian. Full lips, a barrel chest, bowlegged. An unattractive man, but with a certain tenderness in his eyes — this is what Bella saw. His possessions were held in two suitcases tied with rope, which he carried uncomplainingly from the market to the house and up the stairs. He looked into the room for significantly longer than was needed to take it in.

“I am a good cook,” Bella said.

“It is reminding me a little of my boyhood room. Yes, I will take it with gratitude.”

He pressed the back of his hand to his forehead and closed his eyes a moment, as if a terrible image had come to him. She wanted to reach out and touch his hand, but she said, “You can pay rent today?”

“I have a wife and child.”

“Here? The room is too small.”

“In Germany. She refused to leave. We did not have the same political ideas. They will come for me if I stay. I was a coward to leave, perhaps.”

She had never heard a man say such a thing about himself. But there is a kind of man who needs to prostrate himself even before strangers, eternally hoping for forgiveness. She watched him take out his shabby wallet and count out the money. She took the bills from his thick fingers and slipped them into the pocket of her apron.

“Dinner is in an hour,” she said.

Of course, I did not see all this myself — there is much that I did not see directly. But just as it is possible to guess that a man is thinking of an ace or a heart, or that a woman in the audience wishing to volunteer will be pliant or troublesome, so it is possible to know what is said and done, what is desired and feared.

I did, however, see my mother ladle the
pasta al forno
from the ceramic dish onto the new boarder's plate. Miss Kussman passed it to him, not hiding her resentment at having been displaced one seat at the table. I watched the new boarder take up a forkful and put it experimentally into his mouth. His eyes bulged as he opened his mouth and fanned with his hand.

“It . . . is . . . hot!”

“Food should be hot. You like it?”

“It is very good.”

My father snorted and, ignoring the knife, tore off the end of the bread. Miss Kussman said, “And what sort of work did you do back in Germany, if I may ask?” She herself worked in the Neilson's factory and sometimes brought me broken chocolate bars in a paper bag that I now shared with Corinne. She had a prominent Adam's apple that reminded me of Olive Oyl.

“I was working in the office of an architect. Making models. Flats for working people. Common spaces. Gardens and meeting rooms. But then there was no work.”

“And there's no work here,” my father said.

“Yes, you are an expert on that,” my mother said.

Miss Kussman asked, “And what are you doing now?”

“Oh, anything to keep body and soul together.” He was digging into his food now, hardly able to eat fast enough. “Mr. Kleeman,” he said. “You are not related to the Kleeman Writing Instrument Company? I see their advertisements everywhere. I even have one, you see?”

My mother laughed. She laughed again, flinging back her head, and the boarder looked up at her as if she might be a little mad.

“When I grow up, I'm going to move to New York. Going to be a singer. A big star.”

We were walking down Yonge Street on Saturday night, past Muirhead's Cafeteria, Scholes Hotel. Laughter from a tavern door as it opened, smell of beer and cigarettes. Women with cheap fur collars held on to their men.

“Why do you have to go to New York?” I said, not quite understanding my envy.

“You can't be a real singer in this town. Here they like the Andrews Sisters. Bing Crosby. All that smooth stuff. This is a cowtown.”

“It isn't.”

“Where's your coloured section? Where's your Cotton Club? It isn't a big city without Negro people.”

We stopped in front of Heintzman Hall and looked through the plate glass at the shining black pianos. I wondered whether she was right. In truth, the farthest I'd managed to imagine was leaving the house of my parents. It had never before that moment occurred to me that I might go somewhere else, and I felt almost as if the wind had been knocked out of me.

A sailor stumbled into me and kept going.

“Anyway,” I said. “You can't be a famous singer. You've got a voice like a washing machine.”

“Take that back.”

She grabbed my arm and bent it behind my back. Grimacing, I tried to pull myself free, but she had me good. I squinted through the tears and saw the marquee for Brant's Vaudeville.
All Live! Shows Running Continuously Till Midnight.

“I'll let you go if you come in with me,” she said.

“But . . . we don't have . . . any . . . money.”

“So? We'll sneak in. The doorman isn't even there. Probably on a piss break.”

“We might get caught.”

“Will you come with me or do I twist your arm a bit more?”

“Okay, okay.”

Corinne let go, only to grab my sleeve. She pulled me down to sneak under the ticket booth and then rushed me through the door and across the red lobby carpet. She yanked open the inside door and then we were in the dark of the theatre. We stood letting our eyes adjust. A man with a dog act was on. Every time he bent over to pick something up, one of the dogs jumped on his back.

“Those dogs are smarter than you,” she whispered. “Come on.”

She skipped down the aisle and slid into a seat three rows from the front. I took the seat beside her. The man and the dogs took their bows and the curtain came down. Three girls came on and did a fake cancan.

“Those women are all so ugly they must be sisters.”

True, but I looked at their frilly underpants anyway. After them came a violinist and an Irish singer, followed by a husband-and-wife comedy act. I was thinking about putting my hand onto Corinne's knobby knee, whether I'd get a slap to the head, when the curtain came up on a man in tails and top hat. He was drunk, or seemed it anyway, trying to keep himself upright as he patted his pockets in search of a cigarette. When he came up empty, he shrugged, but when he put his hand to his lips, a burning cigarette appeared. Surprised, he dropped it onto the stage and stamped it out. But another appeared in the same hand, and then a third in his other hand. He threw them down too, but more cigarettes replaced them and then one seemed to jump into his mouth. He staggered about in increasing dismay, burning cigarettes appearing faster than he could drop them.

The audience laughed, but I leaned forward, riveted. How did the cigarettes just appear? I hated the drunk act, the slurred voice, the cheap humour, but none of that mattered. Anyone could learn to dance, or tell a joke, but this man broke the laws of nature. He made a tear in the world and put his hand through it. I didn't know that he was one of a hundred imitators of Cardini, one of the greatest sleight-of-hand magicians of the time. I only knew that I too wanted to pull objects out of the air.

When we left the theatre, I couldn't talk. Corinne gabbed on about this or that act, but I had no words. Instead, I made her walk quickly up to College Street then past the market, up to deserted Harbord, and through the back alley into the back garden of my house. Most of the garden was taken up with an old, high shed where years ago my father had kept a horse. He had left the factory and for a year or two, while my uncle was beginning to make his fortune, had sold pots and kettles from a wagon. I had been three or four, but I could still remember that old sway-backed horse. Once, my father had let me feed it some carrot tops.

“What are you up to?” Corinne said when I pushed the shed door open and led her inside. It was dark but for slits of lamplight leaking in between some of the slats. Mouldering straw still lay on the dirt ground. Some rusted tools leaned in a corner. “I bet there are mice in here. Maybe spiders . . .”

I grabbed Corinne and kissed her. I didn't even know how to kiss; our teeth banged together. She started to push me away, her hands flat on my chest, but I pulled her tighter and pressed my pelvis against hers. My body was a fire of pain. “You can't . . . tell . . . anybody,” she said, pulling off her shirt. She smelled of sweat and lemon soap. We stepped away from each other and, eyes down, took all our clothes off and laid them over the straw.

“Don't you think I ever did this before,” she said.

“I don't.”

“You're only fourteen.”

“You're only sixteen.”

“You don't have one of those rubber things.”

“I do have one.”

It hadn't been easy to get, but I had made the effort because I didn't think that Corinne would agree without it. Everyone knew there was a Parents' Information Bureau worker who would supply you as long as you didn't look like a cop. All I had to do was pay a guy who worked at one of the stalls to tell the woman he wanted it for himself and his wife. Now I pulled the package out of my pocket to show her.

“You mean you've been planning this?”

“I don't know how to use it exactly,” I admitted.

“We can figure it out,” she said.

I could not believe the softness of her skin. But we were both rough with each other, like children wrestling. That first time was more a relief than a pleasure. But there would be the next day and the day after that and the day after that. At other times we would talk just as we did before, as if nothing had changed. But there was something new between us. Something precious that would protect us.