Clara Callan (11 page)

Evelyn has given me several books of poetry by American women: Edna St. Vincent Millay, Marianne Moore, Louise Bogan. She also gave me some novels by Hemingway and Lewis and Thomas Wolfe, so I have plenty to read next week when I am recovering from whatever happens to me tomorrow night. Evelyn is a tough little bulldog of a woman and so clever and well read. She has a good heart. I have never met anyone like her. Nora is after me to come with her to the studio to see how they put the play on and I will one day, but not now, I am too nervous. I just want to read or listen to the radio. Nora
returns in the late afternoon and before supper she likes a glass of beer and a cigarette. She drinks her beer while reading aloud from the script for the next day’s program, walking back and forth from the front window to the kitchen with the cigarette in her mouth. She could strike one as very sexual in this pose. Strong good legs and bosom, and looking at her I wonder if there is a man in her life these days. There was
always someone “on the fringes” in Toronto. The other day she made a passing reference to some “little recent heartbreak.”

Nora has gone shopping, thank heaven, and I am at last alone. She is driving me to distraction with her fussing. Since last night I have felt like screaming. It’s worse than the actual pain between my legs.

“Are you sure you are going to be okay if I step out?”

“Yes, yes of course, Nora.”

“Let me fix that pillow. Can I get you anything? How about a glass of ice water or some tea?”

The urge to scream is never far below the surface. It’s a matter of control and small smiles.

“Nora, please, I’m fine. Just get on with what you’re doing.”

“You’re sure now?”

“Yes, yes, I’m sure.”

I love her, I really do, but she irritates me so easily. It was ever thus and ever will be, I suppose.

Now I must try to set down what happened last night. We were told to be at a certain address at eleven o’clock. It was up in a Negro section of the city called Harlem. It was a long taxi ride on a hot night with heat lightning. I counted the streets as the warm air from the open windows rushed against our faces. We kept the windows open because it was so stuffy in the car, but we had to hold onto our hats, mine a little Robin Hood thing that Nora had loaned me, and hers, a kind of fedora that mostly concealed her face. Nora had memorized
the address because there was to be no evidence of an address on paper. In case we were found out, I imagine.

At 132nd Street we stopped for a red light and Nora pointed to a long lineup in front of a dance club. They were mostly white people.

“I’ve been to that club,” Nora whispered. “They have wonderful jazz music.”

The taxi driver misinterpreted her whispering and asked if we wanted to get out at that intersection, but Nora said, “No, please drive on to the address I gave you.”

I wondered what the driver thought we were about, two white women alone in that part of the city at night. Or did he guess? Perhaps he had transported other hapless creatures like myself across his River Styx. All I could see of my Charon was a thick neck and a flat leather cap covered with union buttons.

The streets of Harlem were filled even at this late hour: a slow moving parade of dark people. I could smell fried meat and hear dance xband music from the doorways of clubs. Clusters of men stood on street corners smoking cigarettes and talking to the women passing by in their brightly coloured dresses. On this summer night, the people seemed to live on the street. Others leaned out windows and called down to passersby. It was all good-natured, a kind of carnival, and I could have enjoyed looking out at it under different circumstances. Beside me, Nora was twisting a handkerchief and I felt sorry that she had been dragged into this with me.

We turned down a side street and the driver had trouble with the number. He had to get out of the car and look at a darkened storefront. We were off the main avenue now and it was quiet and empty on that street. When he came back to the car, the driver said, “I’m not crazy about walking around up here.” He was cross with us. We drove another block and stopped in front of a building. To give him his due, the driver got out again and checked the address. “This is it,” he said. Nora paid him and she must have been generous because he thanked her before leaving.

So the taxi went down the street and we stood in front of the building, watching the tail lights disappear. Nora pressed a buzzer and almost immediately a light appeared in the hallway. It was as if someone had been waiting there in the dark for us. The door was opened by a slender, lightly coloured Negress. She might have been pretty had her face not been so badly pitted by some disease, chicken pox perhaps. Her cheeks were terribly scored and it made her look severe and disapproving. She turned out the hallway light and led us without a word to a small elevator, a kind of brass cage scarcely big enough for three. The woman had a sour winey smell to her. The elevator took us up to the third floor and we went down a hallway past office doors with frosted glass windows with the names of notaries and chiropractors and loan agencies. The shabbiness of the place distressed me; I had expected more from Evelyn’s Park Avenue doctor. I saw myself dying horribly on a table of bloodied sheets behind one of those doors.
To calm myself I returned to this thought: When this is over I can go back to my street and my house; I will feel again the coolness under the trees on my veranda; on rainy autumn nights I will enjoy the warmth of my kitchen.

The Negress opened a door that had no name on the glass and showed us into a small room which looked very like a doctor’s or dentist’s office. Wooden chairs. A bench with armrests. Venetian blinds. A pile of
National Geographic
magazines on a low table. A lamp in the corner casting a little yellow light. The window was partly open and I could smell the soft rank air from the alley below and hear music from a radio. After the Negress left, Nora and I sat on the wooden bench and she held my hand.

“Are you all right?” she whispered.

“Yes, I’m fine,” I answered.

We could hear dance band music from somewhere and a little thunder and then it rained for a few minutes, just a shower. Nora whispered the names of the songs as they were played on the radio. She said it was a program she heard some nights. She told me she liked to
lie in bed and listen to the dance band music that came from the big hotels downtown. She whispered all this to me hurriedly as though she were afraid she would run out of time before she could tell me these things about herself. And so she named the songs as they were played on the radio. “Under a Blanket of Blue,” “The Touch of Your Hand,” “Japanese Sandman.” There was a lovely and sordid wistfulness to all this. The soft thundery air and the rain, the dance tunes. It seemed to infect Nora like a fever and she began to cry. I felt a catch in my own throat. Nora pressed the handkerchief to her eyes.

“This is so awful,” she said.

“Yes, it is,” I said.

I did feel such regret for getting her into all this. If we were found out, her career in radio would be over; there would be a terrible scandal and we would both be in disgrace. It was so horrible and yet we had to see it through. I felt a kind of despair then that passed between us. I think we both felt it. Perhaps it had to do with other feelings that must accompany this kind of experience. The feeling that something was about to be broken. When all was said and done, a human life or the beginning of one was going to be ended. The tramp’s child and mine. I felt something about that. I don’t know. I don’t want to think about it right now. Sitting there on that bench, I wanted to tell Nora how it all came about. I wanted to tell her how the tramp had seized my wrists and whirled me about and flung his suit coat into the grass; how he had fallen on top of me after I stumbled and how he did what he did to me and how the walleyed boy had sat on the railway track and watched us. I wanted to tell
her how impossible it would be for me to bear the offspring of such a man and perhaps I almost began to blurt out something. I think I said, “Nora, let me tell you,” or “Nora, I want to tell you,” but then we heard voices in the hallway, a man’s and a woman’s, and the door opened. A tall elderly man came briskly into the room and passed us. He barely glanced our way as he opened the door to the inner office. He had taken off his hat and was shaking the rain from it. I saw that he had a head of beautiful thick white hair and a
slight stoop. A woman wearing a nurse’s uniform then came into the room and smiled at us. She was stout, about fifty, with a broad, pleasant face.

“Hello there,” she said. “Now which one of you is the patient?”

Nora seemed frozen with terror or grief, tongue-tied. I said, “I am.”

The woman (was she really a nurse, I wondered) smiled again.

“That’s fine then. Come along now, dear. The doctor will see you.”

Nora squeezed my hand and I stood up and followed the woman into the room. There was a table and on it was a white sheet. Everything looked quite clean and I was grateful for this. The doctor’s back was to me. I saw his rounded shoulders as he washed his hands at a sink in the corner. He had taken off his suit coat and was in his shirtsleeves. The woman took me behind a screen and handed me a cotton smock.

“Take all your clothes off, dear, and put this on. How far along are you now?”

I told her and she patted my arm.

“That’s all right then. The doctor will look after things for you.”

She was really very nice with her broad amiable face. Someone’s grandmother, I suppose. So I was barefoot and naked beneath the cotton gown and I thought, I am dealing with this and it will soon be over and I can return to my life in Whitfield and no one will ever know what happened to me on that Saturday afternoon. Even the details will fade in time. Now and then in the years ahead, the memory will recur in dreams, and awaken me, or when I am an old woman, parting a bedroom curtain on a spring day, looking down on Church Street. But at least I will be able to live around those memories. The event will not have ruined everything. This is how I thought last night and it helped as I lay on the table. The doctor was still at the sink and I looked sideways at his rounded shoulders and silvery hair. Some terrible needs had brought him to this room by the barbecue restaurants and dance halls. I tried to imagine giving your life over to something like drugs or alcohol. How could it happen?

When he approached the sheeted table he wore a mask across his face, and all I could see was the silvery hair and the blue eyes and the large white hands. The woman too had now put on a little mask to cover her mouth and nose and so they stood above me. The doctor said nothing, but he patted my shoulder and nodded to the woman.

“Now we’re going to give you something to make you sleep, dear, and when you wake up, you’ll be as good as new,” she said.

How could I ever be as good as new, I thought? She was only trying to make me feel more comfortable. I could see that, and I now had confidence in these strangers from another country who were going to make things right again in my life. The woman had placed a rubber cup over my mouth and nose and I felt suddenly closed in, mildly panicked.

“Breathe deeply, dear,” she said. “Breathe deeply and count along with me. Remember when you were a little girl and skipped with your friends? One, two, buckle my shoe. Three, four, shut the door. Five, six, pick up sticks.”

She was wrong about my childhood. I hated skipping. I used to watch the other girls, but I never joined in though I remember the songs. I wanted to tell the woman that she had misread me; that I was not that kind of child at all. I was too peculiar and aloof. I wanted to tell her all that, but instead, when I opened my eyes, Nora was holding my hand. For several moments I had no idea where I was, and Nora’s voice seemed to come from the end of a long tunnel. It sounded so hollow and distant, though I heard every word distinctly.

“It’s all right, Clara. It’s all over now. We’ll be going home in a few minutes.”

I was looking up at her pale worried face. “Have they gone?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said. “It’s all over. The coloured woman is going to call a cab for us. You must be very careful. There’ll be some bleeding. We have to watch for hemorrhaging though the nurse said you’ll be fine if you’re careful. Plenty of bedrest for the next week, she said.”

Then she left and I could hear her talking to the coloured woman. I had a dull ache between my legs and there were napkins there. So the tramp’s seed had been scraped from me. I would not bring his child into the world, but I could not help thinking what a curious mixture it would have been. Still I felt lighter and saw my life as filled now with possibilities.

The murmuring voices made me want to return to sleep, but Nora and the Negress came over to the table and helped me to my feet. I felt a rush of blood from within, as if I were a vessel of fluids that had been suddenly tipped and was now spilling. A faint sickness overtook me then as I sat on the edge of the table. I told myself that the next few hours would be difficult but they would have to be endured. There is so much to endure. Father used to say that. “You have to put up with things,” he would say. “Every day brings something to put up with.”

So, we walked slowly through the empty dark office building. Nora with her hat pulled down holding onto one of my arms and the Negress with her frowning pockmarked face and winey smell holding onto the other. We made our way into that cramped cage of an elevator and down to the first floor and out to the street where a taxi was waiting. The air had cooled and there was a faint lightness in the sky between the buildings. I was startled by that. It was nearly daybreak. Nora told me it was half past four. I was grateful to sit down and glad that I was well bandaged, for I didn’t want to soil the seat of the taxi. We drove down Seventh Avenue in that half darkness between the end of night and the beginning of day. At the street intersections, the traffic lights were blinking and the driver didn’t stop. There were almost no cars now, only a few taxis. I saw some coloured people gathered outside a club and a man in shirtsleeves and a derby hat sitting on a curb: down a side street an old peddler was adjusting
the harness of his horse and wagon. By the lighted windows of all-night restaurants, people were eating and looking out at the street. Those are some things I saw as we drove downtown early this morning.