Mrs. Thompson sat quite still, trying to make sense of this. “Taking advantage of a woman is a criminal offense,” she observed. “I heard Mr. Sherman say another thing, Jeannie. He said, ‘If your wife wants to press a charge and talk to some lawyer, let me tell you,’ he said, ‘you’ll never work again anywhere,’ he said. Vern said, ‘I know that, Mr. Sherman.’ And Mr. Sherman said, ‘Let me tell you, if any reporters or any investigators start coming around here, they’ll get their … they’ll never …’ Oh, he was mad. And Vern said, ‘I came over to tell you I was quitting, Mr. Sherman.’ ” Mrs. Thompson had been acting this with spirit, using a quiet voice when she spoke for Vern and a blustering tone for Mr. Sherman. In her own voice, she said, “If you’re wondering how I came to hear all this, I was strolling by Mr. Sherman’s office window — his bungalow, that is. I had Maureen out in her pram.” Maureen was the Thompsons’ youngest doll.
Jeannie might not have been listening. She started to tell something else: “You know, where we were before, on Vern’s last job, we weren’t in a camp. He was away a lot, and he left me in Amos, in a hotel. I liked it. Amos isn’t all that big, but it’s better than here. There was this German in the hotel. He was selling cars. He’d drive me around if I wanted to go to a movie or anything. Vern didn’t like him, so we left. It wasn’t anybody’s fault.”
“So he’s given up two jobs,” said Mrs. Thompson. “One because he couldn’t leave you alone, and now this one. Two jobs, and you haven’t been married five months. Why should another man be thrown out of work? We don’t need to know a thing. I’ll be sorry if it was Jimmy Quinn,” she went on, slowly. “I like that boy. Don’t say the name, dear. There’s Evans. Susini. Palmer. But it might have been anybody, because you had them all on the boil. So it might have been Jimmy Quinn — let’s say — and it could have been anyone else, too. Well, now let’s hope they can get their minds back on the job.”
“I thought they all liked me,” said Jeannie sadly. “I get along with people. Vern never fights with me.”
“Vern never fights with anyone. But he ought to have thrashed you.”
“If he … you know. I won’t say the name. If he’d liked me, I wouldn’t have minded. If he’d been friendly. I really mean that. I wouldn’t have gone wandering up the road, making all this fuss.”
“Jeannie,” said Mrs. Thompson, “you don’t even know what you’re saying.”
“He could at least have liked me,” said Jeannie. “He wasn’t even friendly. It’s the first time in my life somebody hasn’t liked me. My heart is broken, Mrs. Thompson. My heart is just broken.”
She has to cry, Mrs. Thompson thought. She has to have it out. She rocked slowly, tapping her foot, trying to remember how she’d felt about things when she was twenty, wondering if her heart had ever been broken, too.
1961
The Ice Wagon Going Down the Street
NOW THAT they are out of world affairs and back where they started, Peter Frazier’s wife says, “Everybody else did well in the international thing except us.”
“You have to be crooked,” he tells her.
“Or smart. Pity we weren’t.”
It is Sunday morning. They sit in the kitchen, drinking their coffee, slowly, remembering the past. They say the names of people as if they were magic. Peter thinks, Agnes Brusen, but there are hundreds of other names. As a private married joke, Peter and Sheilah wear the silk dressing gowns they bought in Hong Kong. Each thinks the other a peacock, rather splendid, but they pretend the dressing gowns are silly and worn in fun.
Peter and Sheilah and their two daughters, Sandra and Jennifer, are visiting Peter’s unmarried sister, Lucille. They have been Lucille’s guests seventeen weeks, ever since they returned to Toronto from the Far East. Their big old steamer trunk blocks a corner of the kitchen, making a problem of the refrigerator door; but even Lucille says the trunk may as well stay where it is, for the present. The Fraziers’ future is so unsettled; everything is still in the air.
Lucille has given her bedroom to her two nieces, and sleeps on a camp cot in the hall. The parents have the living-room divan. They have no privileges here; they sleep after Lucille has seen the last television show that interests her. In the hall closet their clothes are crushed by winter overcoats. They know they are being judged for the first time. Sandra and Jennifer are waiting for Sheilah and Peter to decide. They are waiting to learn where these exotic parents will fly to next. What sort of climate will Sheilah consider? What job will Peter consent to accept? When the parents are ready, the children will make a decision of their own. It is just possible that Sandra and Jennifer will choose to stay with their aunt.
The peacock parents are watched by wrens. Lucille and her nieces are much the same — sandy-colored, proudly plain. Neither of the girls has the father’s insouciance or the mother’s appearance — her height, her carriage, her thick hair, and sky-blue eyes. The children are more cautious than their parents; more Canadian. When they saw their aunt’s apartment they had been away from Canada nine years, ever since they were two and four; and Jennifer, the elder, said, “Well, now we’re home.” Her voice is nasal and flat. Where did she learn that voice? And why should this be home? Peter’s answer to anything about his mystifying children is, “It must be in the blood.”
On Sunday morning Lucille takes her nieces to church. It seems to be the only condition she imposes on her relations: the children must be decent. The girls go willingly, with their new hats and purses and gloves and coral bracelets and strings of pearls. The parents, ramshackle, sleepy, dim in the brain because it is Sunday, sit down to their coffee and privacy and talk of the past.
“We weren’t crooked,” says Peter. “We weren’t even smart.”
Sheilah’s head bobs up; she is no drowner. It is wrong to say they have nothing to show for time. Sheilah has the Balenciaga. It is a black afternoon dress, stiff and boned at the waist, long for the fashions of now, but neither Sheilah nor Peter would change a thread. The Balenciaga is their talisman, their treasure; and after they remember it they touch hands and think that the years are not behind them but hazy and marvelous and still to be lived.
The first place they went to was Paris. In the early ’fifties the pick of the international jobs was there. Peter had inherited the last scrap of money he knew he was ever likely to see, and it was enough to get them over: Sheilah and Peter and the babies and the steamer trunk. To their joy and astonishment they had money in the bank. They said to each other, “It should last a year.” Peter was fastidious about the new job; he hadn’t come all this distance to accept just anything. In Paris he met Hugh Taylor, who was earning enough smuggling gasoline to keep his wife in Paris and a girl in Rome. That impressed Peter, because he remembered Taylor as a sour scholarship student without the slightest talent for life. Taylor had a job, of course. He hadn’t said to himself, I’ll go over to Europe and smuggle gasoline. It gave Peter an idea; he saw the shape of things. First you catch your fish. Later, at an international party, he met Johnny Hertzberg, who told him Germany was the place. Hertzberg said that anyone who came out of Germany broke now was too stupid to be here, and deserved to be back home at a desk. Peter nodded, as if he had already thought of that. He began to think about Germany. Paris was fine for a holiday, but it had been picked clean. Yes, Germany. His money was running low. He thought about Germany quite a lot.