Blind Assassin (99 page)

The Toronto Star, August 28, 1935

Society Schoolgirl Found Safe

SPECIAL TO THE STAR

Police called off their search yesterday for fifteen-year-old society schoolgirl Laura Chase, missing for over a week, when Miss Chase was found safely lodged with family friends Mr. and Mrs. E. Newton-Dobbs at their summer residence in Muskoka. Well-known industrialist Richard E. Griffen, married to Miss Chase’s sister, spoke to reporters by telephone on behalf of the family. “My wife and I are very relieved,” he said. “It was a simple confusion, caused by a letter which was delayed in the post. Miss Chase made holiday arrangements of which she believed us to have been aware, as did her host and hostess. They do not read the newspapers while on vacation or this mix-up would never have occurred. When they returned to the city and became aware of the situation, they rang us immediately.”

Questioned about rumours that Miss Chase had run away from home and had been located in curious circumstances at the Sunnyside Beach Amusement Park, Mr. Griffen said he did not know who was responsible for these malicious fabrications but he would make it his business to find out. “It was an ordinary misunderstanding, such as might happen to anybody,” he stated. “My wife and I are grateful that she is safe, and sincerely thank the police, the newspapers, and the concerned public for their help.” Miss Chase is said to have been unsettled by the publicity, and is refusing interviews.

Although no lasting harm was done, these are by no means the first serious difficulties to have been caused by faulty postal delivery. The public deserves a service it can rely on unquestioningly. Government officials should take note.

The Blind Assassin: Street walk

She walks along the street, hoping she looks like a woman entitled to be walking along the street. Or along this street. She doesn’t, though. She’s dressed wrong, her hat is wrong, her coat is wrong. She ought to have a scarf tied over her head and under her chin, a baggy coat worn along the sleeves. She ought to look drab and frugal.

The houses here are cheek by jowl. Servants’ cottages once, row On row, but there are fewer servants now, and the rich have made other provisions. Sooty brick, two up, two down, privy out back. Some have the remains of vegetable gardens on their tiny front lawns—a blackened tomato vine, a wooden stake with string dangling from it. The gardens couldn’t have gone well—it would have been too shady, the earth too cindery. But even here the autumn trees have been lavish, the remaining leaves yellow and orange and vermilion, and a deeper red like fresh liver.

From inside the houses comes howling, barking, a rattle or slam. Female voices raised in thwarted rage, the defiant yells of children. On the cramped porches men sit on wooden chairs, hands dangling from knees, out of work but not yet out of house and home. Their eyes on her, their scowls, taking bitter stock of her with her fur trim at wrists and neck, her lizard handbag. It could be they are lodgers, crammed into cellars and odd corners to help cover the rent.

Women hurry along, heads down, shoulders hunched, carrying brown paper bundles. Married, they must be. The word
braised
comes to mind. They’ll have been scrounging bones from the butcher, they’ll be toting home the cheap cuts, to be served with flabby cabbage. Her shoulders are too far back, her chin too far up, she doesn’t wear that beaten-down look: when they raise their heads enough to focus on her, the glances are filthy. They must think she’s a hooker, but in shoes like that what’s she doing down here? Way below her league.

Here’s the bar, on the corner where he said it would be. The beer parlour. Men are gathered in a clump outside it. None of them says anything to her as she goes past, they just stare as if from thickets, but she can hear the muttering, hatred and lust mixed in the throat, following her like the wash from a ship. Perhaps they’ve mistaken her for a church worker or some other sniffy do-gooder. Poking scrubbed fingers into their lives, asking questions, offering table scraps of patronizing help. But she’s dressed too well for that.

She took a taxi, paid it off three blocks away, where there was more traffic. It’s best not to become an anecdote: who’d take a cab, around here? Though she’s an anecdote anyway. What she needs is a different coat, picked up at a rummage sale, crumpled into a suitcase. She could go into a hotel restaurant, leave her own coat at the check, slip into the powder room, change. Frump up her hair, smudge her lipstick. Emerge as a different woman.

No. It would never work. There’s the suitcase, just to begin with; there’s getting out of the house with it.
Where are you off to in such a hurry?

And so she’s stuck doing a cloak-and-dagger number without a cloak. Relying on her face alone, its guile. She’s had enough practice by now, in smoothness, coolness, blankness. A lifting of both eyebrows, the candid, transparent stare of a double agent. A face of pure water. It’s not the lying that counts, it’s evading the necessity for it. Rendering all questions foolish in advance.

There is however some danger. For him too: more than there was, he’s told her. He thinks he was spotted once, on the street: recognized. Some goon from the Red Squad, maybe. He’d walked through a crowded beer joint, out the back door.

She doesn’t know whether to believe in it or not, this sort of danger: men in dark bulgy suits with their collars turned up, cars on the prowl.
Come with us. We’re taking you in.
Bare rooms and harsh lights. It seems too theatrical, or else like things that occur only in fog, in black and white. Only in other countries, in other languages. Or if here, not to her.

If caught, she’d renounce him, before the cock crowed even once. She knows that, plainly, calmly. Anyway she’d be let off, her involvement viewed as frivolous dabbling or else a rebellious prank, and whatever turmoil might result would be covered up. She’d have to pay for it privately, of course, but with what? She’s already bankrupt: you can’t get blood from a stone. She’d close herself off, put up the shutters. Out to lunch, permanently.

Lately she’s had the sense of someone watching her, though whenever she reconnoitres there’s nobody there. She’s being more careful; she’s being as careful as she can. Is she afraid? Yes. Most of the time. But her fear doesn’t matter. Or rather, it does matter. It enhances the pleasure she feels with him; also the sense that she’s getting away with it.

The real danger comes from herself. What she’ll allow, how far she’s willing to go. But allowing and willing have nothing to do with it. Where she’ll be pushed, then; where she’ll be led. She hasn’t examined her motives. There may not be any motives as such; desire is not a motive. It doesn’t seem to her that she has any choice. Such extreme pleasure is also a humiliation. It’s like being hauled along by a shameful rope, a leash around the neck. She resents it, her lack of freedom, and so she stretches out the time between, rationing him. She stands him up, fibs about why she couldn’t make it—claims she didn’t see the chalked markings on the park wall, didn’t get the message—the new address of the non-existent dress shop, the postcard signed by an old friend she’s never had, the telephone call for the wrong number.

But in the end, back she comes. There’s no use resisting. She goes to him for amnesia, for oblivion. She renders herself up, is blotted out; enters the darkness of her own body, forgets her name. Immolation is what she wants, however briefly. To exist without boundaries.

Still, she finds herself wondering about things that never occurred to her at first. How does he do his laundry? One time there were socks drying on the radiator—he’d seen her looking, whipped them out of sight. He tidies things away before her visits, or at least he takes a swipe at it. Where does he eat? He’s told her he doesn’t like to be seen too often in one place. He must move around, from one eatery, one beanery, to another. In his mouth these words have a sleazy glamour. Some days he’s more nervous, he keeps his head down, he doesn’t go out; there are apple cores, in this or that room; there are bread crumbs on the floor.

Where does he get the apples, the bread? He’s oddly reticent about such details—what goes on in his life when she’s not there. Perhaps he feels it might diminish him in her eyes, to know too much. Too many sordid particulars. Perhaps he’s right. (All those paintings of women, in art galleries, surprised at private moments. Nymph Sleeping. Susanna and the Elders. Woman Bathing, one foot in a tin tub—Renoir, or was it Degas? Both, both women plump. Diana and her maidens, a moment before they catch the hunter’s prying eyes. Never any paintings called Man Washing Socks in Sink.)

Romance takes place in the middle distance. Romance is looking in at yourself, through a window clouded with dew. Romance means leaving things out: where life grunts and snuffles, romance only sighs. Does she want more than that—more of him? Does she want the whole picture?

The danger would come from looking too closely and seeing too much—from having him dwindle, and herself along with him. Then waking up empty, all of it used up—over and done. She would have nothing. She would be
bereft.

An old-fashioned word.

He hasn’t come to meet her, this time. He said it was better not. She’s been left to make her way alone. Tucked into the palm of her glove there’s a square of folded paper, with cryptic directions, but she doesn’t need to look at it. She can feel the slight glow of it against her skin, like a radium dial in the dark.

She imagines him imagining her—imagining her walking along the street, closer now, impending. Is he impatient, on edge, can he hardly wait? Is he like her? He likes to imply indifference—that he doesn’t care whether she’ll arrive or not—but it’s just an act, one of several. For instance, he’s no longer smoking ready-mades, he can’t afford them. He rolls his own, with one of those obscene-looking pink rubber devices that turns out three at a time; he cuts them with a razor blade, then stows them in a Craven A package. One of his small deceptions, or vanities; his need for them makes her breath catch.

Sometimes she brings him cigarettes, handfuls of them—largesse, opulence. She nicks them out of the silver cigarette box on the glass coffee table, crams them into her purse. But she doesn’t do this every time. It’s best to keep him in suspense, it’s best to keep him hungry.

He lies on his back, replete, smoking. If she wants avowals, she has to get them beforehand—make sure of them first, like a whore and her money. Meagre though they may be.
I’ve missed you,
he might say. Or:
I can’t get enough of you.
His eyes shut, grinding his teeth to hold himself back; she can hear it against her neck.

Afterwards, she has to fish.

Say something.

Like what?

Like anything you like.

Tell me what you want to hear.

If I do that and then you say it, I won’t believe you.

Read between the lines then.

But there aren’t any lines. You don’t give me any.

Then he might sing:

Oh, you put your dingus in, and you pull your dingus out,

And the smoke goes up the chimney just the same—

How’s that for a line? he’ll say.

You really are a bastard.

I’ve never claimed otherwise.

No wonder they resort to stories.

She turns left at the shoe repair, then a block along, then two houses. Then the small apartment building: The Excelsior. It must be named after the poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. A banner with a strange device, a knight sacrificing all earthly concerns to scale the heights. The heights of what? Of armchair bourgeois pietism. How ridiculous, here and now.

The Excelsior is red brick with three storeys, four windows each floor, with wrought-iron balconies—more like ledges than balconies, no room for a chair. A cut above the neighbourhood once, now a place where people cling to the edges. On one balcony someone’s improvised a clothesline; a greying dishcloth hangs on it like the flag of some defeated regiment.

She walks past the building, then crosses at the next corner. There she stops and glances down as if there’s something caught on her shoe. Down, then back. There’s nobody walking behind her, no slow car. A stout woman labouring up front steps, a string bag in either hand like ballast; two patched boys chasing a grubby dog along the sidewalk. No men here except three old porch vultures hunched over a shared newspaper.

She turns then and retraces her steps, and when she comes to the Excelsior she ducks into the alleyway beside it and hurries along, forcing herself not to run. The asphalt is uneven, her heels too high. This is the wrong place to turn an ankle. She feels more exposed now, caught in the glare, although there are no windows. Her heart’s going hard, her legs are flimsy, silken. Panic has its hook into her, why?

He won’t be there, says a soft voice in her head; a soft anguished voice, a plaintive cooing voice like a mourning dove’s. He’s gone away. He’s been taken away. You’ll never see him again. Never. She almost cries.

Silly, frightening herself like that. But there’s a real part to it all the same. He could vanish more easily than she could: she’s of a fixed address, he’d always know where to find her.

She pauses, lifts her wrist, breathes in the reassuring smell of perfumed fur. There’s a metal door towards the back, a service door. She knocks lightly.