The Loved and the Lost Page 6

  “Excuse me,” McAlpine said, expecting him to move and step aside.

  “Think nothing of it,” the big man whispered without moving at all. “Hot, ain’t it?”

  “I hadn’t noticed it,” McAlpine said, turning his face away from the icy wind.

  “Maybe you don’t feel the heat. Me, I have to cool off.” The man hadn’t raised his voice above the whisper, and as he smiled benevolently, flicking his cigar ash at McAlpine’s feet, the hard snow bounced off his hairy arms and he seemed to enjoy some strange sense of power. “Thinking of going in?” he asked. “I’m Wolgast. Me and Doyle own the joint.”

  “Oh. Well, my name’s McAlpine. Is a friend of mine, Foley, in there?”

  “You really a friend of Foley’s?”

  “I was supposed to meet him here.”

  “Why didn’t you say so?” Wolgast asked in a jovial whisper. “I was trying to make up my mind if you were a jerk.”

  “A jerk?”

  “We don’t go for jerks around here,” Wolgast whispered. “Anybody but jerks in the bar. In the restaurant it’s all right. Jerks can eat and drink their heads off as long as they pay the shot. Get what I mean?” he asked with the indulgent air of a man who was so securely established in his own city he could accept or reject anyone who came to his place for a drink.

  “Come on, I’ll take you in,” he said.

  He led McAlpine through the dimly lit restaurant to the small checkroom near the toilet, then back to the little bar at the left of the entrance which looked like a smoke-filled washroom. He took him into the babble of coughing and laughter. Blinking, McAlpine looked around for Foley. On the walls were pictures of fighters and mocking caricatures of distinguished Montreal citizens. It was not much of a bar. It had five shabby red leather stools and three chromium tables along the wall and one bigger table at the window alcove, but it obviously wasn’t a poor man’s bar, for the clients at the tables were all well dressed.

  “There’s Foley,” Wolgast whispered.

  “Where?”

  “Behind the bar, helping Doyle. He likes to play bartender. Foley’s the only guy I’d trust behind the stick. Hey, Chuck, a friend of yours,” he called.

  “Hi Jim,” Foley called, mixing a drink. “I’m with you in a minute. Got my job to do.” McAlpine grinned and wanted to fit in, but he felt ill at ease. “Pay no attention to Doyle,” Foley said, indicating the swarthy lean man with the shiny black hair and small sharp eyes, who was leaning disconsolately on the cash register. “He’s sore tonight. An awful hangover. Last night he went on a spree and treated us all and made Wolgast do all the work. Now Wolgast is on a spree and Doyle has to wait on him. You’d never know it, but he’s drunk as an owl.”

  “Hey bartender,” Wolgast said to Doyle. “Wake up and meet a friend of Foley’s. McAlpine’s the name. Give him a drink on me.” To McAlpine he said, “Call him Derle and he’ll feel at home. An Irish thrush from Brooklyn.”

  “And him! He’s a Jewish lush from Poland,” Doyle said sourly. After reflecting a moment he added belligerently, “Who says I’m not an Irishman?”

  “Okay, who isn’t an Irishman?” Wolgast said, winking.

  “McAlpine, though, is a historian,” Foley said.

  “A historian. What’s a historian? I’m a heeb myself,” Wolgast said, shrugging. “Introduce the historian, Chuck.” Wolgast carefully paid Doyle for McAlpine’s drink, and Doyle punched the cash register with an angry disdain. “That fresh air outside is wonderful,” Wolgast said, and he went out.

  Coming from behind the bar to the alcove table, Foley introduced McAlpine to his friends; he was happy being among his own people, and being able to invite McAlpine to sit down with them.

  Their faces shone with sweat, and they all broke into unpredictable bursts of laughter. They took turns laughing at one another. A fat blonde stockbroker named Arthur Nixon, who looked like a pink and white elephant, was trying to tell a story to an ex-fighter named Dave Green, now a successful tailor who read Spinoza. But Green, pushing the stockbroker’s hand off his shoulder, was trying to argue with Claude Gagnon, the dapper French Canadian cartoonist with the fancy striped shirt, who couldn’t be bothered with him because he himself had found a listener in the big grey man, a brooding Buddha. The grey man, who listened because no one any longer listened to him, was Walter Malone, an editorial writer whose life had been ruined by the war; it had compelled him to leave Paris where he had been understood and happy.

  “Where did Wolgast get the whisper?” McAlpine asked the stockbroker.

  “Claims he was gassed in the First World War,” the stock-broker said. “Derle, on the other hand, insists Wolgast never saw the war. Just whispers like that so people will have to listen attentively. So you’re a historian, eh, McAlpine?”

  “It’s a fact. Why?”

  “How would you like to listen to me?” he asked with a shy diffidence.

  “Why, of course. Go ahead.”

  “Good God,” the stockbroker shouted happily. “At last a man who’ll listen to me!”

  “Not yet,” Gagnon the cartoonist shouted, grabbing at McAlpine’s arm. “I’ve a question to ask the professor. It’s this. What has history to do with you and me?”

  “Pay no attention to Gagnon,” the stockbroker pleaded. “He’ll talk all night. Look, this happened when I was in Chicago—”

  “I want my little share of history,” Gagnon insisted. “I’m not getting it.”

  “And you won’t, Gagnon, no one can agree on your story,” Malone explained wearily.

  “The great Malone in exile trying to quote Napoleon. With Malone it’s always Napoleon.”

  “Pay no attention to him,” Malone said. “Why should anyone write his wretched little history?”

  “You haven’t answered my question, McAlpine.”

  “It’s complicated. We’d do better if we had another drink,” McAlpine said good-naturedly. They were kidding him about his own subject, and he liked it and ordered a round of drinks. The grinning, approving faces came closer. Doyle, his face now right at his shoulder, was derisive and happy, his headache gone. The ashes of his cigar wavered over McAlpine’s glass, and over his shoulder, and then fell heavily on his coat sleeve. “I’ll give you some real history, professor,” Doyle said, his impudent face full of mockery. “This is what happens after a war. A couple of hours ago a guy comes in here looking for trouble. A guy with a wooden leg, a war veteran, see? And he didn’t like the table I gave him and he wanted to show off to his lady friends. ‘Sit down and relax,’ I said. Well, what did he do? He thumped his wooden leg at me. I stiffened my own leg like this, see, and I thumped it on the floor like this, clump, clump. ‘Don’t pull that wooden leg on me,’ I said.”

  Wolgast, who had returned to the room, smiled at them blissfully, and as the smile grew wider he began to weave; then he slowly collapsed into the arms of McAlpine, who had jumped up in time to grab him. “Thanks, thanks, dear friend,” he whispered. “I’ve wondered what professors did for a living. You’re a very nice man.” Beaming like a baby he patted McAlpine’s cheek and tried to kiss him, and then sighed and closed his eyes.

  “I should have a partner who’s a lush,” Doyle said rather bitterly.

  “Here, Jim. Put him down on the chair,” Foley said tenderly. “Around here anything goes. Even the owners, one by one. You’ll always have a home here, Jim. How do you like the joint?”

  “Why didn’t I bring Mr. Carver along?” McAlpine answered with an ironic grin. “What do you think, Mr. Foley?”

  “An idea,” Foley said, snickering. “Do it next time, kid. Humanity on its last legs, and Carver here with his dignity down. Come on, my bladder’s bothering me.”

  Only when they got to the washroom were they beyond the droning voices of the sweating, tireless storytellers.

  “It goes on like that all night,” Foley said happily as he led the way to the small toilet near the coat check room. “I know they’re all lunkheads. I don’t ask wh
y I’m happy.”

  “Me neither unless the ashes from Doyle’s cigar are dropping in my eyes.”

  “I must speak to Derle about that cigar,” Foley said and if he had owned a share in the place he couldn’t have been more concerned. “He should watch that cigar.”

  “I think he should. How about leaving now, Chuck?”

  “Where else is there to go in this town?”

  “Down to St. Antoine with me.”

  “Those nigger nightclubs?” Foley combed his red hair. “What is this?”

  “I ran into Peggy Sanderson on the street,” McAlpine said as they came out of the narrow washroom. “I think you missed something, Chuck. Peggy isn’t interested only in Negro writers and musicians. She has Negro friends. I think she likes being with Negroes.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “It’s a fact, Chuck. I talked to her.”

  “I see,” Foley said slowly.

  He was a shrewd, good-natured, companionable man who enjoyed the intimate confidences of most women, and he knew gamblers, gangsters, police officials, burlesque dancers, and important businessmen in Montreal; they all spoke of him as a friend with a wonderful quality; nothing he ever heard about anybody surprised him; nothing a friend ever did aroused any deep prejudice in him, but now, watching him, McAlpine knew he must have heard gossip about Peggy and have refused to face it, have wanted to believe she was only interested in Negro culture. Now he realized he might have got her wrong, and he was sore.

  “Come on along with me, Chuck.”

  “Not down there,” Foley said irritably. “That stuff belongs to my salad days in the early thirties. Now it’s for high-school boys and débutantes. Come on back to the bar and have a drink.”

  “Another half-hour in there and I’ll go crazy,” McAlpine said, fumbling in his pocket for his hat check.

  “Jim, just a minute. Aren’t you kidding me about Peggy?” Foley asked.

  “I’m sure she’ll be there. Come on and see for yourself.”

  “No – no. If you want to go down there why don’t you phone Milton Rogers?”

  “Who’s he?”

  “The photographer. Don’t you remember? We used to drink with him.”

  “I remember. But it’s too late to phone anybody. I’ll go alone.”

  “Here, give me that check.” Foley handed it to the plump girl behind the counter, who was so devoted to him that she often saw he got a better pair of galoshes than the ones he had checked with her. “Give him his coat, Annie,” he said, putting fifty cents in her hand. Taking McAlpine’s coat from the girl, he helped him on with it. This gesture made McAlpine feel all the more apologetic.

  “So long, Chuck,” he said.

  “So long,” Foley said unhappily.

  It had turned colder; the powdered snow blew up his pant legs. People passing by had their heads down and their chins buried deep in their collars. When he had crossed Dorchester, going on down Mountain Street toward the dark railway underpass, he stopped apprehensively. Lights gleamed in the black blotch of the underpass. Snow flew across the inky entrance. And high above the railroad tracks one tall brick chimney rose against the night sky. In the underpass, on the sheltered cobblestones, his footfalls were heavy. The lighted corner was just below – the corner of St. Antoine – a glare of neon signs shining pinkly on the snow.

  Negroes stood in front of the Café St. Antoine; others huddled together against the cold in the shelter of the entrance to the corner grocery store. A taxi skidded to a stop at the café entrance; three white men and a stout woman got out, and McAlpine started to follow them into the café; but he drew back; he was alone and a stranger, and he told himself he wanted to look around the neighbourhood before going in.

  He wandered east toward the station, he looked into taverns, and felt conspicuous when Negroes stared at him. He peered into windows of little grocery stores, delicatessens, a pool parlour and a cleaning and pressing establishment. It had stopped snowing. The clouds overhead were breaking up. Behind the tower of the Windsor Station and the lighted tower of the Sun Life Building the moon was trying to shine through, but it was only a pale flicker. The gaps in the clouds closed again. Turning back, he looked uneasily at the nightclub entrance and went down the slope toward the tracks. In the lighted window of the room over the other nightclub across the street he could see a Negro woman with a baby in her arms walking up and down. She began to dance around the room holding the baby, dancing to the music coming from the floor below.

  At the foot of the street was a little square with a row of old brick houses, and this square was all white with snow. McAlpine peered into some of the lighted windows. Music came from a ground-floor open window, the music of a cello and a piano, and he could see three figures, one a Negro at a piano, another, who looked like a French Canadian, at the cello, and the third figure, the face hidden, was bending over the piano. The piano and the cello achieved an hypnotic effect in primitive counter-point, repeating a simple theme over and over with curious discords; but it was the posture, the attitudes of the musicians as they played their solitary theme that held him spellbound: the cello twanged, the piano repeated the minor chords with a little variation, the musicians were held in their strange rapture, and there was nothing in the world for them but the lonely little theme and that one room in the cold night and their own intensity. The shunting of engines in the station yard and the hum of the city and the grey shabby neighbourhood could never break the magic of their private, peculiar, and isolated rapture. Then they smiled at one another, their hands reached out for drinks, and the figure on the piano stool swung around.

  The bass twanging of the cello followed him on down to the bridge over the tracks. From there he could look around the whole neighbourhood. Below the bridge was the St. Henri quarter along the canal, a small industrial city with wretched houses along the tracks, houses so old that some of them had earthen floors, and in summertime barefoot children, running into the houses, came out with muddied feet.

  While he was surveying the shabby neighbourhood a train came toward the bridge, its bell clanging; the smoke billowed out under the bridge and shot up a white cloud in the cold darkness, and the cloud, streaked with the reflection of fire from the engine, whirled around McAlpine while the lighted coaches went swinging away from him.

  He climbed the hill again. Now he would go into the night-club, he thought. As he watched for another taxi to stop in front of the café, he found himself staring up at the mountain’s dark shadow. Everything he really wanted was up there on the mountain among those who had prestige, power, and influence. The shabby street was cut off short, the way blocked by the enormous mountain barrier studded with gleaming lights.

  Back at the café entrance, he stopped: like a man in a spell he saw himself going in and climbing the stairs to the tawdry café and looking for her among the noisy, half-drunken patrons, the blacks and the whites, the few loose-witted, cheap white girls, then finding her on the dance floor swaying in the arms of a whispering Negro who held her tight against him; another white girl who was a soft touch, hopped up by the music.

  He turned away from the café entrance, not admitting he was afraid of what he might find in there; with a deliberate effort, using his head, he recognized rationally it was a mistake to feel so involved with her that he had to climb the stairs and suffer the embarrassment of encountering her with her friends; with an effort he broke the spell and went on home.

  EIGHT

  In the morning the whole city had a glistening winter-white brilliance, a city of barouches with jingling snowbells and fur-capped drivers wrapped in old buffalo robes. Men in coonskin coats swaggered opulently along the downtown streets, and girls on St. Catherine wore white rubber boots. It was milder, and the big wet snowflakes clung to the walls of the buildings and melted and glittered and shone.

  It was a fine morning, and McAlpine couldn’t take the time to dwell on his failure to climb the stairs of the café down on St. Antoine. He or
dered some toast and coffee from room service and asked that The Sun be sent up with it. While he ate he studied the editorial page. He could see his column on the page – the eighth column. And the page badly needed a stimulating, controversial column. As it was, the whole paper had a rather dry Parnassian tone except for the sporting page, which was lively and well edited. Horton might succeed in blocking him, but only temporarily; he would get the job in spite of the delay, he told himself, and when Mr. Carver telephoned and said Horton was coming around he knew he was right.

  A few hours later he had lunch with Catherine at the Café Martin; and she talked about his doing the column from Paris; she built him up and drew him out and led him far away from that Negro café. Then she took him on a shopping trip, and all the delightful signs of their happy intimacy together engrossed him. First they went to a jewellery store where she was having an antique brooch of her grandmother’s reset; and as she explained to the clerk what she wanted done she kept turning to McAlpine for approval, until she started to laugh.

  “What’s the matter?” he asked. But she only shook her head, smiling and looking pleased, and wouldn’t tell. And in the department store, buying a pair of gloves after asking if he liked them, she saw that he was now smiling to himself.

  “Why the smile, Jim?” she asked. But it was his turn to refuse to explain. And then in the milliner’s, where she was paying a bill for two hats, they both turned at the same time and started to laugh. Progress, progress! Aren’t we getting along well! they said with their eyes.

  It all contributed to his confidence. This confidence in himself grew when he went to dinner with her to the Drapers’ big stone house in Westmount. It was boring for both of them. The man talked about nothing but his chain of cafeterias. McAlpine knew Catherine was imploring him to leave and go to some place where they could be alone. It made him feel completely sure of himself; yet only last night, he recalled, he had lacked the confidence to climb the stairs of the Negro café.

  When he had taken Catherine home and he was back at the Ritz, he told himself it was still early and he wanted company, and easily, like that, he went out and got a taxi on Sherbrooke and drove down to St. Antoine.