After You've Gone Page 5

“I guess not. But how will it look?”

  “Unless we tell people, who’ll know?”

  I couldn’t argue with him. Moving made perfect sense. And mostly I thought it sounded like a great idea. Still, I wasn’t completely convinced.

  “I don’t know. This could lead to trouble.”

  “You’re already in trouble.”

  That was true. I softened, although I began to mistrust his motives a little. A flush had spread up his face to the roots of his hair, and I guessed his thoughts at that moment were not a hundred percent innocent. Mine certainly weren’t.

  “Well,” I said. “As long as we know that it’s just temporary. I’ll look for a job, and as soon as I get one, I’ll find another place to live.”

  “Of course.”

  “But, I guess for now, it’s the only thing to do.”

  “Let’s go get your stuff now. It’s ten o’clock. Will he be at the desk?”

  “He’ll be around. But I have a key. We can go through the back.”

  So we returned to the Belleville and crept quietly up and down the back stairs a couple of times with my belongings. I didn’t have much: my guitar, the phonograph and crate of records, some clothes, a box with sheet music, books, and my makeup in it. It only took about ten minutes to clear everything out. We got in the Packard and headed for College Avenue.

  I look back at this time, not with regret or sadness, but with a strange feeling I can’t identify. Once again, I was being uprooted suddenly. It always seemed to work that way for me. It seemed I’d never be able to plan what would happen to me. Things happened in a flash. That morning when I woke up, for instance, I’d had no idea that by nightfall I’d walk away from my job, from my little room in the basement of the Belleville, and go to live with Bill. If you’d told me that even three hours before, I wouldn’t have believed it.

  On the drive over to Bill’s parents’ house I was quiet, thought about my own family. There were five children: Lena was born in 1912, Hana in 1914, Steve in 1916, I was born in 1918, and Maria was born in 1919. Hana died of Spanish Influenza the year I was born. Lena married at sixteen, when I was nine; with that and the age difference, we were never close. Maria and I always seemed to be at each other’s throats. Maybe we were too close together. I got along best with Steve. We understood each other, could be close without talking a lot. I liked to talk as well as anyone, but I also knew that it wasn’t necessary or even desirable to be doing it all the time. Maria was a talker, more like Ma. Those two could talk up a storm, and that’s usually what you could find them doing. I heard Pop ask them once, in sheer exasperation, what the hell it was they found to talk about all the time.

  Ma said it was after Hana died that Pop started to drink in earnest. Pop was always fond of a drink before then, but after that things were never really the same. It affected his work. He wouldn’t show up for jobs, and soon it was hard for him to convince anyone to take him on. Then we started to have to move all the time. Sometimes to skip the rent, sometimes to avoid other creditors. Sometimes we needed a cheaper place, or hoped we could find one that wasn’t so run down. We ended up in all kinds of places: hotel rooms, one-bedroom apartments, old farmhouses on the outskirts of town with no plumbing or electricity.

  Then things seemed to go better for a while. Pop drank less, worked more. For almost a year we were in a nice little house with a yard, although it was right on Albert Street, near the tracks. But in the months before Pop died things got worse again, maybe worse than they’d ever been, and we had to move again, this time into a rundown house on Pasqua Street. We’d only been there a few weeks when I went one night to see It Happened One Night with a boy from school, David Walsh. David was good looking, fair haired, had nice manners, and I was eager to impress him. Everything went fine until he walked me home. The house was dark when we got there, even though it was only 9:30. Then I noticed our beat-up Model A wasn’t parked outside. The front door was unlocked, and I had to make a snap decision. Did I open the door, turn on the light, and let David see what had happened while we were at the movies? Or did I try to fake my way out of it?

  I opened the door and flipped on the light switch. Everything was gone. I stood there and wondered what to do next. They’d done this before; I wasn’t really surprised. Never before had they been in such a hurry that they’d left anybody behind, though.

  “What’s happened?” David asked.

  “They’re gone.” I took a sad last look at him. I knew I’d never go out with him again, not after this. How could I ever explain? But I wasn’t as sad about it as I might have been, because I realized I had other more pressing worries. Like how would I find my family and where would I sleep? Luckily, Steve showed up right then. He nodded at David.

  “C’mon, Lita.”

  We all walked down the front steps together and started down the walk.

  “Goodnight, David. Thank you for the movie.”

  “Is everything all right?” he asked. The poor guy had no idea.

  “Fine. Thanks.”

  The next morning I started at a different school in another part of town. I never did see David again.

  Our new place was a cramped suite on the second floor of a tiny house near the Exhibition grounds, on Connaught Street. Pop was killed after we’d only been there a couple of weeks. Ma had one bedroom, Maria and I had another, and Steve had to sleep on the battered couch in the living room.

  One night I couldn’t sleep, thinking about everything: Pop, how broke we were. What was going to become of us. I could see the glint of my sister’s eyes across the room in the half-light of the streetlight outside our window. “Maria, are you awake?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Sometimes I wonder about Pop. Don’t you?”

  She switched on the cracked yellow celluloid bedside lamp, brushed her dark hair out of her face, and looked at me hard. “What do you mean?”

  “About whether it was really an accident. The driver said he stepped out in front of him without looking. It seems so strange that he would do that.”

  “Are you saying our dad committed suicide?”

  “I don’t know. I just wonder. Pop was pretty sad sometimes.”

  “How can you say that? Didn’t you love Pop?”

  “Of course I did. I always will. But I can’t help wondering.”

  She stood up, face flushed, breathing hard. “If you loved Pop, you wouldn’t even think things like that. How can you?”

  “All right, Maria. Forget I said anything.”

  I switched the lamp back off and said no more. I didn’t need Maria waking Ma and Steve up, too, though it wouldn’t have surprised me if they were already awake.

  And sometimes I think about Mami. Somehow Mami, my grandmother, managed to convince her son and daughter-in-law to bring her along when they came to Canada. She’d seen a lot in her lifetime, from gaining her freedom from slavery as a young girl to the birth of the Romanian state. Coming to Canada, where electric lights and automobiles were commonplace, must have amazed her.

  Mami died a year before my Pop, in 1930, when I was eleven. She was eighty-nine. Ma always maintained that Mami started to go downhill when my grandfather died. She tried to teach me about all kinds of things — reading music, tarot cards, medicinal herbs — on the sly, when Ma wasn’t looking. Ma tended to disregard most of that stuff — superstitious nonsense, she called it. The one thing she did listen to Mami about, though, was music.

  For Mami was a deft guitarist. She also sang beautifully, something she did not pass on to anybody else in the family but Steve. One day when I was nine I sat on the front porch, picked up Mami’s guitar, the one she brought over from Romania, and started to fool around on it.

  Mami came out onto the porch. “I thought I heard someone playing.”

  “I’m sorry, Mami. I just wanted to try it.”

  “No, no, child. That’s all right. You want to learn to play? You have good, long fingers, a great thing for a guitarist.”

  Her
long, leathery hands, covered with age spots, held mine gently, helped my left-hand fingers find their places on the frets, helped my right hand strum the strings. Showed me how the marks on paper related to fingerings. Now, instead of making noise, I was playing music.

  The first thing Mami taught me was “Malagueña,” a basic Flamenco piece. Once I got that down to her satisfaction, we moved on to “Ochi Choryna” or “Dark Eyes,” a traditional Gypsy melody.

  “Sheet music is good, but ear is everything. For Flamenco playing, you pick and strum with your fingers. But you need to know how to use a pick, too. It gives you a different sound,” she said, and gave me a little triangular piece of amber-coloured celluloid.

  By the time I could play “Ochi Choryna” fairly well, the calluses on the ends of my left-hand fingers had built up. Mami taught me a lot over the next two years, and passed on some fine technique. I missed her dearly when she was gone, and kept her guitar.

  Eight

  Lita

  August 1935

  THE MACINNES HOME, A SQUARE TWO-STOREY red brick house with a huge willow on the sloping lawn of the front yard, was not one of the larger ones on College Avenue, but it wasn’t the smallest either. I often looked around at the antique furniture in the parlor, the family portraits, tried to imagine what it would have been like to grow up in this house and wondered how Bill and I ended up together.

  As I suspected, it was a little awkward living there without letting anybody know, or trying not to let anybody know. For one thing the neighbours would be sure to figure it out sooner or later, whether I made a habit of using the back door or not. Then there was the phone and the door.

  “What am I supposed to do when the phone rings?”

  “You’d better not answer it.”

  “Well, what if it’s you?”

  “I’ll call and let it ring three times. Then I’ll hang up for ten seconds and call again. You’ll know it’s me, that way.”

  “Uh-huh. What about when someone comes to the door?”

  “Don’t answer it.”

  One Saturday afternoon, I was going downtown. I needed a new lipstick, thought I’d take a walk and keep an eye out for help-wanted signs. I just needed to get out of the house. Being there alone all week, keeping out of sight while Bill was at work in the hardware store, was lonely. The band had started regular gigs in town and out at Regina Beach. We’d worked the night before. I asked Bill if he wanted to come with me, but all he wanted to do was rest, he said. He offered to give me a ride, but I said I’d take the streetcar. At the bus stop I realized I’d left my sunglasses on the kitchen table and went back to get them. I was about to push the screen door into the kitchen open when I heard Bill laugh. Something made me stop and listen. He must have been on the phone, because I heard him talk after a silent pause.

  “That’s a good one. But don’t worry about it . . . Sure, I’m sure it’s fine . . . So, I’ll see you there. Toodle-oo.”

  Toodle-oo? I didn’t hear any more talking, so I went in. He was making himself a cup of coffee, whistling “Love in Bloom.”

  “Oh, hi, Lita. I didn’t hear you come in. What’s up?”

  “Who was that on the phone?”

  “Oh, just Henry.”

  Henry, eh? If he’d said “toodle-oo” to Henry, I thought, Henry would deck him. I looked at him for a minute, tried to decide whether to push the matter.

  “I thought you were going downtown.”

  “I am. I just forgot my sunglasses. Here they are. See you later.”

  On the streetcar all the way downtown I went over in my mind what I’d heard, trying to fit Henry onto the other end of the conversation. It didn’t work, no matter how hard I tried. I was sure whoever he was talking to wasn’t Henry. Still, how could I mistrust him? He’d been good to me, had never given me reason to doubt him, so why start now? I put it out of my mind and went into Woolworth’s.

  When I came back around 5:30, he was out. The note on the table just said he’d be back later. I tried to swallow my suspicion. Big deal, he had to go out. Could have been doing any one of a million things. I made a sandwich for supper, read the newspaper. Listened to the radio for a while. Finished the book I was reading, The Good Earth. By that time it was 8:30. I played guitar, had a bath. Listened to the radio some more, and by 11:30 decided to go to bed. I was awake another hour or so listening for him, imagining all the horrible (and not so horrible) things that could have happened to him.

  When I got up about 8:30 the next morning, it was obvious that he was home. His shoes were at the front door, his jacket lay in a heap not far from them, and the Packard was parked out front. He didn’t get up for another hour, and didn’t exactly look fresh.

  “Hiya,” he said, and kissed my forehead. “Sorry about last night. I meant to call you, but I lost track of time.”

  “Where were you?”

  “There was a poker game on over at Ian’s. You were already asleep when I got in, and I didn’t want to wake you.”

  “Oh.” I wanted to tell him how worried I was. I wanted to tell him that I didn’t believe him. I wanted to reach up and shake him by the shoulders and tell him to never, ever do that again. I almost did. But I curled and uncurled my fingers once, and let a breath out. I would not be accused of possessiveness, of jealousy. I knew that if I wanted to be in complete control of myself, I had to start with my emotions. We weren’t married. We were free people.

  I turned from him and made myself busy, starting with sweeping the floor.

  Whether there was actually a poker game at Ian’s house that night, I never did discover. Maybe I didn’t really want to. I thought about calling Ian and asking him, but told myself I wouldn’t because I trusted Bill. Still, the seeds of doubt had been planted in my mind. Every time the phone rang when he was out, I wanted to pick it up and find out who it was. And maybe it was my imagination, but it seemed that the phone rang a bit more often after that night. Finally, a week later, when he was at work one afternoon, I could stand it no longer. The phone rang and I picked it up and said hello.

  “Hello,” said a woman’s voice, sounding uncertain. “Is Bill there?”

  “No. He’s not. He’s at work,” I said, trying as hard as I could to sound cool. “Who’s calling, please?”

  The voice didn’t say anything for a bit, and I was about to ask again when it asked, “Lita? Is that you?”

  I had to think fast. I never imagined it would be someone I knew.

  “Yes, this is Lita. Who am I speaking to?”

  “It’s Darlene. Pop and I have been looking everywhere for you! What happened?”

  “Maybe you ought to ask your pop that.”

  “Did he try something?”

  “Yes. So I decided it was time to leave.”

  “You really left us in a pinch,” she said, as if I were the wrongdoer. But I wouldn’t let her do that. Being away from the Belleville for even the little time I’d been gone had proved that I no longer had to feel beholden to Gus Klein. For the longest time, I’d kidded myself into thinking I should somehow be grateful to him, that he was doing me some great favour by letting me work at his hotel for peanuts and allowing me to sleep in a room in the basement. And if he decided to try to attack me once in a while, who was I to complain? I was sure Darlene had been manipulated into thinking these same kinds of things, and worse. I hadn’t spent a night away from the Belleville in over three years, and after being away only a little while I realized how unnatural it was. Staying at Bill’s put that all into perspective for me.

  “I’m sorry you were left short. Did he find someone else?”

  “Yes, he had to. With me in beauty school and all, you know. But this new girl’s an absolute idiot.”

  “That’s too bad.”

  “But, so, what are you doing? Are you working?”

  “No. I’m looking for a job, but there isn’t much out there.”

  “And where are you staying? You didn’t go back to your family, did you?”

/>   What to tell her, what to tell her? On the other hand, what was she doing calling Bill, anyway? I decided to tell her the truth. Perhaps it would show her what was what as far as Bill went. “Well, I’m staying here, actually. Bill said he didn’t want me staying at the hotel anymore.”

  “You’re living with Bill?”

  “Yes. I mean, it’s just temporary, until I get a place of my own. I’ll have to get a job first. His mother is away until the end of September.”

  “Oh, my. I had no idea. I didn’t even know you and Bill were still seeing each other.”

  “Yes. So, anyway, what was it that you wanted to talk to Bill about?”

  “Nothing very important. I wanted to get Ian’s phone number for a friend of mine.”

  “Oh. Well, I can give it to you.”

  “That would be great.”

  I found the number in a little leather-bound book in a drawer in the phone table.

  “Thanks, Lita. Well, hey, that’s great about you and Bill.”

  “It’s not what you think. It’s just that I had nowhere else to go.”

  “Of course.”

  I felt very irritable as I hung up the phone. I’d checked as we were talking; Ian’s number was in the city phone book.

  When Bill came home later I told him, casually, that Darlene had called.

  “Darlene? What did she want?”

  “She wanted Ian’s phone number for a friend of hers. The funny thing is, Ian’s number is in the phone book.”

  “Well, you know Darlene. Not the brightest gal. Anyway, why did you answer the phone?”

  “The last few days, the phone’s been ringing like crazy when you’re out. Today I couldn’t stand it anymore and I picked it up. You know what else? It hasn’t rung once since I talked to her, and that was four hours ago.”

  I’d said too much, I was sure, even as the words rolled off my tongue. Yet, they suggested only half of what I felt. I wanted to yell at him: you were on the phone with her that afternoon, weren’t you? And with her that night. That’s why she’s phoning here. Instead, I only cringed a little inwardly, waited for his anger. I had no right to accuse him of anything. I had no proof of anything.