TRICKS
I
I’ll die,” said Robin, on an evening years ago. “I’ll die if they don’t have that dress ready.” They were in the screen porch of the dark-green clap-board house on Isaac Street. Willard Greig, who lived next door, was playing rummy at the card table with Robin’s sister, Joanne. Robin was sitting on the couch, frowning at a magazine. The smell of nicotiana fought with a smell of ketchup simmering in some kitchen along the street.
Willard watched Joanne barely smile, before she inquired in a neutral voice, “What did you say?”
“I said, I’ll die.” Robin was defiant. “I’ll die if they don’t have that dress ready by tomorrow. The cleaners.”
“That’s what I thought you said. You’d die?”
You could never catch Joanne on any remark of that sort. Her tone was so mild, her scorn so immensely quiet, her smile—now vanished—was just the tiny lifting of a corner of her mouth.
“Well, I will,” said Robin defiantly. “I need it.”
“She needs it, she’ll die, she’s going to the play,” said Joanne to Willard, in a confidential tone.
Willard said, “Now, Joanne.” His parents, and he himself, had been friends of the girls’ parents—he still thought of these two as the girls—and now that all of the parents were dead he felt it was his duty to keep the daughters, as much as possible, out of each other’s hair.
Joanne was now thirty years old, Robin twenty-six. Joanne had a childish body, a narrow chest, a long sallow face, and straight, fine, brown hair. She never tried to pretend she was anything but an unlucky person, stunted halfway between childhood and female maturity. Stunted, crippled in a way, by severe and persisting asthma from childhood on. You didn’t expect a person who looked like that, a person who couldn’t step outside in winter or be left alone at night, to have such a devastating way of catching on to other, more fortunate people’s foolishness. Or to have such a fund of contempt. All their lives, it seemed to Willard, he’d been watching Robin’s eyes fill up with tears of wrath, and hearing Joanne say, “What’s the matter with you now?”
Tonight Robin had felt only a slight sting. Tomorrow was her day to go to Stratford, and she felt herself already living outside Joanne’s reach.
“What’s the play, Robin?” Willard asked, to smooth things as much as he could. “Is it by Shakespeare?”
“Yes. As You Like It.”
“And can you follow him all right? Shakespeare?”
Robin said she could.
“You’re a wonder.”
For five years Robin had been doing this. One play every summer. It had started when she was living in Stratford, training to be a nurse. She went with a fellow student who had a couple of free tickets from her aunt, who worked on costumes. The girl who had the tickets was bored sick—it was King Lear—so Robin had kept quiet about how she felt. She could not have expressed it anyway—she would rather have gone away from the theater alone, and not had to talk to anybody for at least twenty-four hours. Her mind was made up then to come back. And to come by herself.
It wouldn’t be difficult. The town where she had grown up, and where, later, she had to find her work because of Joanne, was only thirty miles away. People there knew that the Shakespeare plays were being put on in Stratford, but Robin had never heard of anybody going to see one. People like Willard were afraid of being looked down on by the people in the audience, as well as having the problem of not following the language. And people like Joanne were sure that nobody, ever, could really like Shakespeare, and so if anybody from here went, it was because they wanted to mix with the higher-ups, who were not enjoying it themselves but only letting on they were. Those few people in town who made a habit of seeing stage productions preferred to go to Toronto, to the Royal Alex, when a Broadway musical was on tour.
Robin liked to have a good seat, so she could only afford a Saturday matinee. She picked a play that was being done on one of her weekends off from the hospital. She never read it beforehand, and she didn’t care whether it was a tragedy or a comedy. She had yet to see a single person there that she knew, in the theater or out on the streets, and that suited her very well. One of the nurses she worked with had said to her, “I’d never have the nerve to do that all on my own,” and that had made Robin realize how different she herself must be from most people. She never felt more at ease than at these times, surrounded by strangers. After the play she would walk downtown, along the river, and find some inexpensive place to eat—usually a sandwich, as she sat on a stool at the counter. And at twenty to eight she would catch the train home. That was all. Yet those few hours filled her with an assurance that the life she was going back to, which seemed so makeshift and unsatisfactory, was only temporary and could easily be put up with. And there was a radiance behind it, behind that life, behind everything, expressed by the sunlight seen through the train windows. The sunlight and long shadows on the summer fields, like the remains of the play in her head.
Last year, she saw Antony and Cleopatra. When it was over she walked along the river, and noticed that there was a black swan—the first she had ever seen—a subtle intruder gliding and feeding at a short distance from the white ones. Perhaps it was the glisten of the white swans’ wings that made her think of eating at a real restaurant this time, not at a counter. White tablecloth, a few fresh flowers, a glass of wine, and something unusual to eat, like mussels, or Cornish hen. She made a move to check in her purse, to see how much money she had.
And her purse was not there. The seldom-used little paisley-cloth bag on its silver chain was not slung over her shoulder as usual, it was gone. She had walked alone nearly all the way downtown from the theater without noticing that it was gone. And of course her dress had no pockets. She had no return ticket, no lipstick, no comb, and no money. Not a dime.
She remembered that throughout the play she had held the purse on her lap, under her program. She did not have the program now, either. Perhaps both had slipped to the floor? But no—she remembered having the bag in the toilet cubicle of the Ladies Room. She had hung it by the chain on the hook that was on the back of the door. But she had not left it there. No. She had looked at herself in the mirror over the washbasin, she had got the comb out to fiddle with her hair. Her hair was dark, and fine, and though she visualized it puffed up like Jackie Kennedy’s, and did it up in rollers at night, it had a tendency to go flat. Otherwise she had been pleased with what she saw. She had greenish-gray eyes and black eyebrows and a skin that tanned whether she tried or not, and all this was set off well by her tight-waisted, full-skirted dress of avocado-green polished cotton, with the rows of little tucks around the hips.
That was where she had left it. On the counter by the washbasin. Admiring herself, turning and looking over her shoulder to catch sight of the V of the dress at the back—she believed she had a pretty back—and checking that there was no bra strap showing anywhere.
And on a tide of vanity, of silly gratification, she had sallied out of the Ladies Room, leaving the purse behind.
She climbed the bank to the street and started back to the theater by the straightest route. She walked as fast as she could. There was no shade along the street, and there was busy traffic, in the heat of the late afternoon. She was almost running. That caused the sweat to leak out from under the shields in her dress. She trekked across the baking parking lot—now empty—and up the hill. No more shade up there, and nobody in sight around the theater building.
But it was not locked. In the empty lobby she stood a moment to get her sight back after the outdoor glare. She could feel her heart thumping, and the drops of moisture popping out on her upper lip. The ticket booths were closed, and so was the refreshment counter. The inner theater doors were locked. She took the stairway down to the washroom, her shoes clattering on the marble steps.
Let it be open, let it be open, let it be there.
No. There was nothing on the smooth veined counter, nothing in the wastebaskets, nothing on any hook on the back of any door.
A man was mopping the floor of the lobby when she came upstairs. He told her that it might have been turned in to the Lost and Found, but the Lost and Found was locked. With some reluctance he left his mopping and led her down another stairs to a cubbyhole containing several umbrellas, parcels, and even jackets and hats and a disgusting-looking brownish fox scarf. But no paisley-cloth shoulder purse.
“No luck,” he said.
“Could it be under my seat?” she begged, though she was sure it could not be.
“Already been swept in there.”
There was nothing for her to do then but climb the stairs, walk through the lobby, and go out onto the street.
She walked in the other direction from the parking lot, seeking shade. She could imagine Joanne saying that the cleaning man had already stashed her purse away to take home to his wife or his daughter, that is what they were like in a place like this. She looked for a bench or a low wall to sit down on while she figured things out. She didn’t see such a thing anywhere.
A large dog came up behind her and knocked against her as it passed. It was a dark-brown dog, with long legs and an arrogant, stubborn expression.
“Juno. Juno,” a man called. “Watch where you’re going.
“She is just young and rude,” he said to Robin. “She thinks she owns the sidewalk. She’s not vicious. Were you afraid?”
Robin said, “No.” The loss of her purse had preoccupied her and she had not thought of an attack from a dog being piled on top of that.
“When people see a Doberman they are often frightened. Dobermans have a reputation to be fierce, and she is trained to be fierce when she’s a watchdog, but not when she’s walking.”
Robin hardly knew one breed of dog from another. Because of Joanne’s asthma, they never had dogs or cats around the house.
“It’s all right,” she said.
Instead of going ahead to where the dog Juno was waiting, her owner called her back. He fixed the leash he was carrying onto her collar.
“I let her loose down on the grass. Down below the theater. She likes that. But she ought to be on the leash up here. I was lazy. Are you ill?”
Robin did not even feel surprised at this change in the conversation’s direction. She said, “I lost my purse. It was my own fault. I left it by the washbasin in the Ladies Room at the theater and I went back to look but it was gone. I just walked away and left it there after the play.”
“What play was it today?”
“Antony and Cleopatra,” she said. “My money was in it and my train ticket home.”
“You came on the train? To see Antony and Cleopatra?”
“Yes.”
She remembered the advice their mother had given to her and to Joanne about travelling on the train, or travelling anywhere. Always have a couple of bills folded and pinned to your underwear. Also, don’t get into a conversation with a strange man.
“What are you smiling at?” he said.
“I don’t know.”
“Well, you can go on smiling,” he said, “because I will be happy to lend you some money for the train. What time does it go?”
She told him, and he said, “All right. But before that you should have some food. Or you will be hungry and not enjoy the train ride. I haven’t anything with me, because when I go to take Juno on her walk I do not bring any money. But it isn’t far to my shop. Come with me and I’ll get it out of the till.”
She had been too preoccupied, until now, to notice that he spoke with an accent. What was it? It was not French or Dutch—the two accents that she thought she could recognize, French from school and Dutch from the immigrants who were sometimes patients in the hospital. And the other thing she took note of was that he spoke of her enjoying the train ride. Nobody she knew would speak of a grown person doing that. But he spoke of it as being quite natural and necessary.
At the corner of Downie Street, he said, “We turn this way. My house is just along here.”
He said house, when he had said shop before. But it could be that his shop was in his house.
She was not worried. Afterwards she wondered about that. Without a moment’s hesitation she had accepted his offer of help, allowed him to rescue her, found it entirely natural that he should not carry money with him on his walks but could get it from the till in his shop.
A reason for this might have been his accent. Some of the nurses mocked the accents of the Dutch farmers and their wives—behind their backs, of course. So Robin had got into the habit of treating such people with special consideration, as if they had speech impediments, or even some mental slowness, though she knew that this was nonsense. An accent, therefore, roused in her a certain benevolence and politeness.
And she had not looked at him at all closely. At first she was too upset, and then it was not easy, because they were walking side by side. He was tall, long-legged, and walked quickly. One thing she had noticed was the sunlight glinting on his hair, which was cut short as stubble, and it seemed to her that it was bright silver. That is, gray. His forehead, being broad and high, also shone in the sun, and she had somehow got the impression that he was a generation beyond her—a courteous, yet slightly impatient, schoolteacherly, high-handed sort of person, who demanded respect, never intimacy. Later, indoors, she was able to see that the gray hair was mixed with a rusty red—though his skin had an olive tint unusual for a redhead—and that his indoor movements were sometimes awkward, as if he wasn’t used to having company in his living space. He was probably not more than ten years older than she was.
She had trusted him for faulty reasons. But she had not been mistaken to do so.
The shop really was in a house. A narrow brick house left over from earlier days, on a street otherwise lined with buildings built to be shops. There was the sort of front door and step and window that a regular house would have, and in the window was an elaborate clock. He unlocked the door, but did not turn around the sign that said Closed. Juno crowded in ahead of them both, and again he apologized for her.
“She thinks it’s her job to check that there’s nobody in here who shouldn’t be, and not anything different from when she went out.”
The place was full of clocks. Dark wood and light wood, painted figures and gilded domes. They sat on shelves and on the floor and even on the counter across which business could be transacted. Beyond that, some sat on benches with their insides exposed. Juno slipped between them neatly, and could be heard thumping up a stairs.
“Are you interested in clocks?”
Robin said “No,” before she thought of being polite.
“All right, then I do not have to go into my spiel,” he said, and led her along the path Juno had taken, past the door of what was probably a toilet, and up the steep stairway. Then they were in a kitchen where all was clean and bright and tidy, and Juno was waiting beside a red dish on the floor, flopping her tail.
“You just wait,” he said. “Yes. Wait. Don’t you see we have a guest?”
He stood aside for Robin to enter the big front room, which had no rug on the wide painted floorboards and no curtains, only shades, on the windows. There was a hi-fi system taking up a good deal of space along one wall, and a sofa along the wall opposite, of the sort that would pull out to make a bed. A couple of canvas chairs, and a bookcase with books on one shelf and magazines on the others, tidily stacked. No pictures or cushions or ornaments in sight. A bachelor’s room, with everything deliberate and necessary and proclaiming a certain austere satisfaction. Very different from the only other bachelor premises Robin was familiar with—Willard Greig’s, which seemed more like a forlorn encampment established casually in the middle of his dead parents’ furniture.
“Where would you like to sit?” he said. “The sofa? It is more comfortable than the chairs. I will make you a cup of coffee and you sit here and drink it while I make some supper. What do you do other times, between when the play is over and the train is going home?”
Foreigners talked differently, leaving a bit of space around the words, the way actors do.
“Walk,” Robin said. “And I get something to eat.”
“The same today, then. Are you bored when you eat alone?”
“No. I think about the play.”
The coffee was very strong, but she got used to it. She did not feel that she should offer to help him in the kitchen, as she would have done with a woman. She got up and crossed the room almost on tiptoe and helped herself to a magazine. And even as she picked it up she knew this would be useless—the magazines were all printed on cheap brown paper in a language she could neither read nor identify.
In fact she realized, once she had it open on her lap, that she could not even identify all the letters.
He came in with more coffee.
“Ah,” he said. “So do you read my language?”
That sounded sarcastic, but his eyes avoided her. It was almost as if, inside his own place, he had turned shy.
“I don’t even know what language it is,” she answered.
“It is Serbian. Some people say Serbo-Croatian.”
“Is that where you come from?”
“I am from Montenegro.”
Now she was stumped. She did not know where Montenegro was. Beside Greece? No—that was Macedonia.
“Montenegro is in Yugoslavia,” he said. “Or that is what they tell us. But we don’t think so.”
“I didn’t think you could get out of those countries,” she said. “Those Communist countries. I didn’t think you could just leave like ordinary people and get out into the West.”
“Oh, you can.” He spoke as if this did not interest him very much, or as if he had forgotten about it. “You can get out if you really want to. I left nearly five years ago. And now it is easier. Very soon I am going back there and then I expect I will be leaving again. Now I must cook your dinner. Or you will go away hungry.”
“Just one thing,” said Robin. “Why can’t I read these letters? I mean, what letters are they? Is this the alphabet where you come from?”
“The Cyrillic alphabet. Like Greek. Now I’m cooking.”
She sat with the strangely printed pages open in her lap and thought that she had entered a foreign world. A small piece of a foreign world on Downie Street in Stratford. Montenegro. Cyrillic alphabet. It was rude, she supposed, to keep asking him things. To make him feel like a specimen. She would have to control herself, though now she could come up with a host of questions.
All the clocks below—or most of them—began to chime the hour. It was already seven o’clock.
“Is there any later train?” he called from the kitchen.
“Yes. At five to ten.”
“Will that be all right? Will anybody worry about you?”
She said no. Joanne would be displeased, but you could not exactly call that being worried.
Supper was a stew or thick soup, served in a bowl, with bread and red wine.
“Stroganoff,” he said. “I hope you like it.”
“It’s delicious,” she said truthfully. She was not so sure about the wine—she would have liked it sweeter. “Is this what you eat in Montenegro?”
“Not exactly. Montenegrin food is not very good. We are not famous for our food.”
So then it was surely all right to say, “What are you famous for?”
“What are you?”
“Canadian.”
“No. What are you famous for?”
That vexed her, she felt stupid. Yet she laughed.
“I don’t know. I guess nothing.”
“What Montenegrins are famous for is yelling and screaming and fighting. They’re like Juno. They need discipline.”
He got up to put on some music. He did not ask what she wanted to hear, and that was a relief. She did not want to be asked which composers she preferred, when the only two she could think of were Mozart and Beethoven and she was not sure she could tell their work apart. She really liked folk music, but she thought he might find that preference tiresome and condescending, linking it up to some idea she had of Montenegro.
He put on a kind of jazz.
Robin had never had a lover, or even a boyfriend. How had this happened, or not happened? She did not know. There was Joanne, of course, but there were other girls, similarly burdened, who had managed. A reason might have been that she had not given the matter enough attention, soon enough. In the town she lived in, most girls were seriously attached to somebody before they finished high school, and some didn’t finish high school, but dropped out to get married. The girls of the better class, of course—the few girls whose parents could afford to send them to college—were expected to detach themselves from any high school boyfriend before going off to look for better prospects. The discarded boys were soon snapped up, and the girls who had not moved quickly enough then found themselves with slim pickings. Beyond a certain age, any new man who arrived was apt to come equipped with a wife.
But Robin had had her opportunity. She had gone away to train to be a nurse, which should have given her a fresh start. Girls who trained to be nurses got a chance at doctors. There too, she had failed. She didn’t realize it at the time. She was too serious, maybe that was the problem. Too serious about something like King Lear and not about making use of dances and tennis games. A certain kind of seriousness in a girl could cancel out looks. But it was hard to think of a single case in which she envied any other girl the man she had got. In fact she couldn’t yet think of anybody she wished she had married.
Not that she was against marriage altogether. She was just waiting, as if she was a girl of fifteen, and it was only now and then that she was brought up against her true situation. Occasionally one of the women she worked with would arrange for her to meet somebody, and then she would be shocked at the prospect that had been considered suitable. And recently even Willard had frightened her, by making a joke about how he should move in someday, and help her look after Joanne.
Some people were already excusing her, even praising her, taking it for granted that she had planned from the beginning to devote her life to Joanne.
When they had finished eating he asked her if she would like to take a walk along the river before she caught her train. She agreed, and he said that they could not do that unless he knew her name.
“I might want to introduce you,” he said.
She told him.
“Robin like the bird?”
“Like Robin Redbreast,” she said, as she had often said before, without thinking about it. Now she was so embarrassed that all she could do was go on speaking recklessly.
“It’s your turn now to tell me yours.”
His name was Daniel. “Danilo. But Daniel here.”
“So here is here,” she said, still in this saucy tone which was the result of embarrassment at Robin Redbreast. “But where is there? In Montenegro—do you live in a town or the country?”
“I lived in the mountains.”
While they were sitting in the room above his shop there had been a distance, and she had never feared—and never hoped— that the distance would be altered by any brusque or clumsy or sly movement of his. On the few occasions when this had happened with other men she had felt embarrassed for them. Now of necessity she and this man walked fairly close to each other and if they met someone their arms might brush together. Or he would move slightly behind her to get out of the way and his arm or chest knocked for a second against her back. These possibilities, and the knowledge that the people they met must see them as a couple, set up something like a hum, a tension, across her shoulders and down that one arm.
He asked her about Antony and Cleopatra, had she liked it (yes) and what part she had liked best. What came into her mind then were various bold and convincing embraces, but she could not say so.
“The part at the end,” she said, “where she is going to put the asp on her body”—she had been going to say breast, then changed it, but body did not sound much better—“and the old man comes in with the basket of figs that the asp is in and they joke around, sort of. I think I liked it because you didn’t expect that then. I mean, I liked other things too, I liked it all, but that was different.”
“Yes,” he said. “I like that too.”
“Did you see it?”
“No. I’m saving my money now. But I read a lot of Shakespeare once, students read it when they were learning English. In the daytime I learned about clocks, in the nighttime I learned English. What did you learn?”
“Not so much,” she said. “Not in school. After that I learned what you have to, to be a nurse.”
“That’s a lot to learn, to be a nurse. I think so.”
After that they spoke about the coolness of the evening, how welcome it was, and how the nights had lengthened noticeably, though there was still all August to get through. And about Juno, how she had wanted to come with them but had settled down immediately when he reminded her that she had to stay and guard the shop. This talk felt more and more like an agreed-upon subterfuge, like a conventional screen for what was becoming more inevitable all the time, more necessary, between them.
But in the light of the railway depot, whatever was promising, or mysterious, was immediately removed. There were people lined up at the window, and he stood behind them, waiting his turn, and bought her ticket. They walked out onto the platform, where passengers were waiting.
“If you will write your full name and address on a piece of paper,” she said, “I’ll send you the money right away.”
Now it will happen, she thought. And it was nothing. Now nothing will happen. Good-bye. Thank you. I’ll send the money. No hurry. Thank you. It was no trouble. Thank you just the same. Good-bye.
“Let’s walk along here,” he said, and they walked along the platform away from the light.
“Better not to worry about the money. It is so little and it might not get here anyway, because I am going away so soon. Sometimes the mail is slow.”
“Oh, but I must pay you back.”
“I’ll tell you how to pay me back, then. Are you listening?”
“Yes.”
“I will be here next summer in the same place. The same shop. I will be there by June at the latest. Next summer. So you will choose your play and come here on the train and come to the shop.”
“I will pay you back then?”
“Oh yes. And I will make dinner and we’ll drink wine and I will tell you all about what has happened in the year and you will tell me. And I want one other thing.”
“What?”
“You will wear the same dress. Your green dress. And your hair the same.”
She laughed. “So you’ll know me.”
“Yes.”
They were at the end of the platform, and he said, “Watch here,” then, “All right?” as they stepped down on the gravel.
“All right,” said Robin with a lurch in her voice, either because of the uncertain surface of the gravel or because by now he had taken hold of her at the shoulders, then was moving his hands down her bare arms.
“It is important that we have met,” he said. “I think so. Do you think so?”
She said, “Yes.”
“Yes. Yes.”
He slid his hands under her arms to hold her closer, around the waist, and they kissed again and again.
The conversation of kisses. Subtle, engrossing, fearless, transforming. When they stopped they were both trembling, and it was with an effort that he got his voice under control, tried to speak matter-of-factly.
“We will not write letters, letters are not a good idea. We will just remember each other and next summer we will meet. You don’t have to let me know, just come. If you still feel the same, you will just come.”
They could hear the train. He helped her up to the platform, then did not touch her anymore, but walked briskly beside her, feeling for something in his pocket.
Just before he left her, he handed her a folded piece of paper. “I wrote on it before we left the shop,” he said.
On the train she read his name. Danilo Adzic. And the words Bjelojevici. My village.
She walked from the station, under the dark full trees. Joanne had not gone to bed. She was playing solitaire.
“I’m sorry I missed the early train,” Robin said. “I’ve had my supper. I had Stroganoff.”
“So that’s what I’m smelling.”
“And I had a glass of wine.”
“I can smell that too.”
“I think I’ll go right up to bed.”
“I think you’d better.”
Trailing clouds of glory, thought Robin on her way upstairs. From God, who is our home.
How silly that was, and even sacrilegious, if you could believe in sacrilege. Being kissed on a railway platform and told to report in a year’s time. If Joanne knew about it, what would she say? A foreigner. Foreigners pick up girls that nobody else will have.
For a couple of weeks the two sisters hardly spoke. Then, seeing that there were no phone calls or letters, and that Robin went out in the evenings only to go to the library, Joanne relaxed. She knew that something had changed, but she didn’t think it was serious. She began to make jokes to Willard.
In front of Robin she said, “You know that our girl here has started having mysterious adventures in Stratford? Oh yes. I tell you. Came home smelling of drink and goulash. You know what that smells like? Vomit.”
What she probably thought was that Robin had gone to some weird restaurant, with some European dishes on the menu, and ordered a glass of wine with her meal, thinking herself to be sophisticated.
Robin was going to the library to read about Montenegro.
“For more than two centuries,” she read, “the Montenegrins maintained the struggle against the Turks and the Albanians, which for them was almost the whole duty of man. (Hence the Montenegrins’ reputation for dignity, bellicosity, and aversion to work, which last is a standing Yugoslav joke.)”
Which two centuries these were, she could not discover. She read about kings, bishops, wars, assassinations, and the greatest of all Serbian poems, called “The Mountain Garland,” written by a Montenegrin king. She hardly retained a word of what she read. Except the name, the real name of Montenegro, which she did not know how to pronounce. Crna Gora.
She looked at maps, where it was hard enough to find the country itself, but possible finally, with a magnifying glass, to become familiar with the names of various towns (none of them Bjelojevici) and with the rivers Moraca and Tara, and the shaded mountain ranges, which seemed to be everywhere but in the Zeta Valley.
Her need to follow this investigation was hard to explain, and she did not try to explain it (though of course her presence in the library was noted, and her absorption). What she must have been trying to do—and what she at least half succeeded in doing—was to settle Danilo into some real place and a real past, to think that these names she was learning must have been known to him, this history must have been what he learned in school, some of these places must have been visited by him as a child or as a young man. And were being visited, perhaps, by him now. When she touched a printed name with her finger, she might have touched the very place he was in.
She tried also to learn from books, from diagrams, about clock making, but there she was not successful.
He remained with her. The thought of him was there when she woke up, and in lulls at work. The Christmas celebrations brought her thoughts round to ceremonies in the Orthodox Church, which she had read about, bearded priests in gold vestments, candles and incense and deep mournful chanting in a foreign tongue. The cold weather and the ice far out into the lake made her think of winter in the mountains. She felt as if she had been chosen to be connected to that strange part of the world, chosen for a different sort of fate. Those were words she used to herself. Fate. Lover. Not boyfriend. Lover. Sometimes she thought of the casual, reluctant way he had spoken about getting in and out of that country, and she was afraid for him, imagining him involved in dark schemes, cinematic plots and dangers. It was probably a good thing that he had decided there should be no letters. Her life would have been drained entirely into composing them and waiting for them. Writing and waiting, waiting and writing. And of course worrying, if they didn’t arrive.
She had something now to carry around with her all the time. She was aware of a shine on herself, on her body, on her voice and all her doings. It made her walk differently and smile for no reason and treat the patients with uncommon tenderness. It was her pleasure to dwell on one thing at a time and she could do that while she went about her duties, while she ate supper with Joanne. The bare wall of the room, with the rectangles of streaked light reflected on it through the slatted blinds. The rough paper of the magazines, with their old-fashioned sketched illustrations, instead of photographs. The thick crockery bowl, with a yellow band around it, in which he served the Stroganoff. The chocolate color of Juno’s muzzle, and her lean strong legs. Then the cooling air in the streets, and the fragrance from the municipal flower beds and the streetlamps by the river, around which a whole civilization of tiny bugs darted and circled.
The sinking in her chest, then the closing down, when he came back with her ticket. But after that the walk, the measured steps, the descent from the platform to the gravel. Through the thin soles of her shoes she had felt pain from the sharp pebbles.
Nothing faded for her, however repetitive this program might be. Her memories, and the embroidery on her memories, just kept wearing a deeper groove.
It is important that we have met.
Yes. Yes.
Yet when June came, she delayed. She had not yet decided on which play, or sent away for her ticket. Finally she thought it best to choose the anniversary day, the same day as last year. The play on that day was As You Like It. It struck her that she could just go on to Downie Street, and not bother with the play, because she would be too preoccupied or excited to notice much of it. She was superstitious, however, about altering the day’s pattern. She got her ticket. And she took her green dress to the cleaners. She had not worn it since that day, but she wanted it to be perfectly fresh, crisp as new.
The woman who did the pressing, at the cleaners, had missed some days that week. Her child was sick. But it was promised that she would be back, the dress would be ready on Saturday morning.
“I’ll die,” said Robin. “I’ll die if they don’t have that dress ready for tomorrow.”
She looked at Joanne and Willard, playing rummy at the table. She had seen them in this pose so often, and now it was possible she might never see them again. How far they were from the tension and defiance, the risk of her life.
The dress was not ready. The child was still sick. Robin considered taking the dress home and ironing it herself, but she thought she would be too nervous to make a good job of it. Especially with Joanne looking on. She went immediately downtown, to the only possible dress shop, and was lucky enough, she thought, to find another green dress, just as good a fit but made along straight lines, and sleeveless. The color was not avocado, but lime, green. The woman in the store said that was the color this year, and that full skirts and pinched waists had gone out.
Through the train window she saw rain starting. She did not even have an umbrella. And in the seat across from her was a passenger she knew, a woman who had had her gallbladder out just a few months ago, at the hospital. This woman had a married daughter in Stratford. She was a person who thought that two people known to each other, meeting on the train and headed for the same place, should keep up a conversation.
“My daughter’s meeting me,” she said. “We can take you where you’re going. Especially when it’s raining.”
It was not raining when they got to Stratford, the sun was out and it was very hot. Nevertheless Robin saw nothing for it but to accept the ride. She sat in the backseat with two children who were eating Popsicles. It seemed a miracle that she did not get some orange or strawberry liquid dripped onto her dress.
She was not able to wait for the play to be over. She was shivering in the air-conditioned theater because this dress was made of such light material and had no sleeves. Or it might have been from nervousness. She made her apologetic way to the end of the row, and climbed up the aisle with its irregular steps and went out into the daylight of the lobby. Raining again, very hard. Alone in the Ladies Room, the same one where she had lost her purse, she worked at her hair. The damp was destroying her pouf, the hair she had rolled to be smooth was falling into wispy curly black strands around her face. She should have brought hairspray. She did as good a job as she could, back-combing.
The rain had stopped when she came out, and again the sun was shining, glaring on the wet pavement. Now she set out. Her legs felt weak, as on those occasions when she had to go to the blackboard, at school, to demonstrate a math problem, or had to stand in front of the class to recite memory work. Too soon, she was at the corner of Downie Street. Within a few minutes now, her life would be changed. She was not ready, but she could not stand any delay.
In the second block she could see ahead of her that odd little house, held in place by the conventional shop buildings on either side.
Closer she came, closer. The door stood open, as was the case with most shops along the street—not many of them had put in air-conditioning. There was just a screen door in place to keep out the flies.
Up the two steps, then she stood outside the door. But did not push it open for a moment, so that she could get her eyes used to the half-dark interior, and not stumble when she went in.
He was there, in the work space beyond the counter, busy under a single bulb. He was bent forward, seen in profile, engrossed in the work he was doing on a clock. She had feared a change. She had feared in fact that she was not remembering him accurately. Or that Montenegro might have altered something—given him a new haircut, a beard. But no—he was the same. The work light shining on his head showed the same bristle of hair, glinting as before, silver with its red-brown tarnish. A thick shoulder, slightly hunched, sleeve rolled up to bare the muscled forearm. An expression on his face of concentration, keenness, perfect appreciation of whatever he was doing, of the mechanism he was working with. The same look that had been in her mind, though she had never seen him working on his clocks before. She had been imagining that look bent on herself.
No. She didn’t want to walk in. She wanted him to get up, come towards her, open the door. So she called to him. Daniel. Being shy at the last moment of calling him Danilo, for fear she might pronounce the foreign syllables in a clumsy way.
He had not heard—or probably, because of what he was doing, he delayed looking up. Then he did look up, but not at her—he appeared to be searching for something he needed at the moment. But in raising his eyes he caught sight of her. He carefully moved something out of his way, pushed back from the worktable, stood up, came reluctantly towards her.
He shook his head at her slightly.
Her hand was ready to push the door open, but she did not do it. She waited for him to speak, but he did not. He shook his head again. He was perturbed. He stood still. He looked away from her, looked around the shop—looked at the array of clocks, as if they might give him some information or some support. When he looked again at her face, he shivered, and involuntarily—but perhaps not—he bared his front teeth. As if the sight of her gave him a positive fright, an apprehension of danger.
And she stood there, frozen, as if there was a possibility still that this might be a joke, a game.
Now he came towards her again, as if he had made up his mind what to do. Not looking at her anymore, but acting with determination and—so it seemed to her—revulsion, he put a hand against the wooden door, the shop door which stood open, and pushed it shut in her face.
This was a shortcut. With horror she understood what he was doing. He was putting on this act because it was an easier way to get rid of her than making an explanation, dealing with her astonishment and female carrying-on, her wounded feelings and possible collapse and tears.
Shame, terrible shame, was what she felt. A more confident, a more experienced, woman would have felt anger and walked away in a fine fury. Piss on him. Robin had heard a woman at work talk about a man who had abandoned her. You can’t trust anything in trousers. That woman had acted as if she was not surprised. And deep down, Robin now was not surprised, either, but the blame was for herself. She should have understood those words of last summer, the promise and farewell at the station, as a piece of folly, unnecessary kindness to a lonely female who had lost her purse and came to plays by herself. He would have regretted that before he got home, and prayed that she wouldn’t take him seriously.
It was quite possible that he had brought back a wife from Montenegro, a wife upstairs—that would explain the alarm in his face, the shudder of dismay. If he had thought of Robin it would be in fear of her doing just what she had been doing— dreaming her dreary virginal dreams, fabricating her silly plans. Women had probably made fools of themselves over him before now, and he would have found ways to get rid of them. This was a way. Better cruel than kind. No apologies, no explanations, no hope. Pretend you don’t recognize her, and if that doesn’t work, slam a door in her face. The sooner you can get her to hate you, the better.
Though with some of them it’s uphill work.
Exactly. And here she was, weeping. She had managed to hold it back along the street, but on the path by the river, she was weeping. The same black swan swimming alone, the same families of ducklings and their quacking parents, the sun on the water. It was better not to try to escape, better not to ignore this blow. If you did that for a moment, you had to put up with its hitting you again, a great crippling whack in the chest.
“Better timing this year,” Joanne said. “How was your play?”
“I didn’t see all of it. Just when I was going into the theater some bug flew into my eye. I blinked and blinked but I couldn’t get rid of it and I had to get up and go to the Ladies and try to wash it out. And then I must’ve got part of it on the towel and rubbed it into the other eye too.”
“You look as if you’d been bawling your eyes out. When you came in I thought that must’ve been a whale of a sad play. You better wash your face in salt water.”
“I was going to.”
There were other things she was going to do, or not do. Never go to Stratford, never walk on those streets, never see another play. Never wear the green dresses, neither the lime nor the avocado. Avoid hearing any news of Montenegro, which should not be too difficult.
II
Now the real winter has set in and the lake is frozen over almost all the way to the breakwater. The ice is rough, in some places it looks as if big waves had been frozen in place. Workmen are out taking down the Christmas lights. Flu is reported. People’s eyes water from walking against the wind. Most women are into their winter uniform of sweatpants and ski jackets.
But not Robin. When she steps off the elevator to visit the third and top floor of the hospital, she is wearing a long black coat, gray wool skirt, and a lilac-gray silk blouse. Her thick, straight, charcoal-gray hair is cut shoulder-length, and she has tiny diamonds in her ears. (It is still noted, just as it used to be, that some of the best-looking, best-turned-out women in town are those who did not marry.) She does not have to dress like a nurse now, because she works part-time and only on this floor.
You can take the elevator up to the third floor in the usual way, but it’s more difficult to get down. The nurse behind the desk has to push a hidden button to release you. This is the Psychiatric Ward, though it is seldom called that. It looks west over the lake, like Robin’s apartment, and so it is often called Sunset Hotel. And some older people refer to it as the Royal York. The patients there are short-term, though with some of them the short terms keep recurring. Those whose delusions or withdrawals or miseries become permanent are housed elsewhere, in the County Home, properly called the Long Term Care Facility, just outside of town.
In forty years the town has not grown a great deal, but it has changed. There are two shopping malls, though the stores on the square struggle on. There are new houses—an adult community—out on the bluffs, and two of the big old houses overlooking the lake have been converted to apartments. Robin has been lucky enough to get one of these. The house on Isaac Street where she and Joanne used to live has been smartened up with vinyl and turned into a real estate office. Willard’s house is still the same, more or less. He had a stroke a few years ago but made a good recovery, though he has to walk with two canes. When he was in the hospital Robin saw quite a lot of him. He talked about what good neighbors she and Joanne had been, and what fun they had playing cards.
Joanne has been dead for eighteen years, and after selling the house Robin has moved away from old associations. She doesn’t go to church anymore, and except for those who become patients in the hospital, she hardly ever sees the people she knew when she was young, the people she went to school with.
The prospects of marriage have opened up again, in a limited way, at her time of life. There are widowers looking around, men left on their own. Usually they want a woman experienced at marriage—though a good job doesn’t come amiss either. But Robin has made it clear that she isn’t interested. The people she has known since she was young say she never has been interested, that’s just the way she is. Some of the people she knows now think she must be a lesbian, but that she has been brought up in an environment so primitive and crippling that she can’t acknowledge it.
There are different sorts of people in town now, and these are the people she has made friends with. Some of them live together without being married. Some of them were born in India and Egypt and the Philippines and Korea. The old patterns of life, the rules of earlier days, persist to some extent, but a lot of people go their own way without even knowing about such things. You can buy almost any kind of food you want, and on a fine Sunday morning you can sit at a sidewalk table drinking fancy coffee and enjoying the sound of church bells, without any thought of worship. The beach is no longer surrounded by railway sheds and warehouses—you can walk on a board-walk for a mile along the lake. There is a Choral Society and a Players Society. Robin is still very active in the Players Society, though not onstage so much as she once was. Several years ago she played Hedda Gabler. The general response was that it was an unpleasant play but that she played Hedda splendidly. An especially good job as the character—so people said—was so much the opposite of herself in real life.
Quite a number of people from here go to Stratford these days. She goes instead to see plays at Niagara-on-the-Lake.
Robin notes the three cots lined up against the opposite wall.
“What’s up?” she says to Coral, the nurse at the desk.
“Temporary,” says Coral, in a dubious tone. “It’s the redistribution.”
Robin goes to hang her coat and bag up in the closet behind the desk, and Coral tells her that these cases are from Perth County. It’s some kind of switch on account of overcrowding there, she says. Only somebody got their wires crossed and the county facility here isn’t ready for them yet, so it’s been decided to park them here for the time being.
“Should I go over and say hello?”
“Up to you. Last I looked they were all out of it.”
The three cots have their sides up, the patients lying flat. And Coral was right, they all seem to be sleeping. Two old women and one old man. Robin turns away, and then turns back. She stands looking down at the old man. His mouth is open and his false teeth, if he has any, have been removed. He has his hair yet, white and cropped short. Flesh fallen away, cheeks sunken, but still a face broad at the temples, retaining some look of authority and—as when she last saw it—of perturbation. Patches of shrivelled, pale, almost silvery skin, probably where cancerous spots have been cut away. His body worn down, legs almost disappearing under the covers, but still some breadth in the chest and shoulders, very much as she remembers.
She reads the card attached to the foot of his bed.
Alexander Adzic.
Danilo. Daniel.
Perhaps that is his second name. Alexander. Or else he has lied, taken the precaution of telling a lie or half a lie, right from the start and nearly to the end.
She goes back to the desk and speaks to Coral.
“Any info on that man?”
“Why? Do you know him?”
“I think I might.”
“I’ll see what there is. I can call it up.”
“No hurry,” Robin says. “Just when you have time. It’s only curiosity. I better go now and see my people.”
It is Robin’s job to talk to these patients twice a week, to write reports on them, as to how their delusions or depressions are clearing up, whether the pills are working, and how their moods are affected by the visits they have had from their relatives or their partners. She has worked on this floor for years, ever since the practice of keeping psychiatric patients close to home was introduced back in the seventies, and she knows many of the people who keep coming back. She took some extra courses to qualify herself for treating psychiatric cases, but it’s something she had a feeling for anyway. Sometime after she came back from Stratford, not having seen As You Like It, she had begun to be drawn to this work. Something—though not what she was expecting—had changed her life.
She saves Mr. Wray till the last, because he generally wants the most time. She isn’t always able to give him as much as he would like—it depends on the problems of the others. Today the rest of them are generally on the mend, thanks to their pills, and all they do is apologize about the fuss they have caused. But Mr. Wray, who believes that his contributions to the discovery of DNA have never been rewarded or acknowledged, is on the rampage about a letter to James Watson. Jim, he calls him.
“That letter I sent Jim,” he says. “I know enough not to send a letter like that and not keep a copy. But yesterday I went looking through my files and guess what? You tell me what.”
“You better tell me,” says Robin.
“Not there. Not there. Stolen.”
“It could be misplaced. I’ll have a look around.”
“I’m not surprised. I should have given up long ago. I’m fighting the Big Boys and who ever wins when you fight Them? Tell me the truth. Tell me. Should I give up?”
“You have to decide. Only you.”
He begins to recite to her, once more, the particulars of his misfortune. He has not been a scientist, he has worked as a surveyor, but he must have followed scientific progress all his life. The information he has given her, and even the drawings he has managed with a dull pencil, are no doubt correct. Only the story of his being cheated is clumsy and predictable, and probably owes a lot to the movies or television.
But she always loves the part of the story where he describes how the spiral unzips and the two strands float apart. He shows her how, with such grace, such appreciative hands. Each strand setting out on its appointed journey to double itself according to its own instructions.
He loves that too, he marvels at it, with tears in his eyes. She always thanks him for his explanation, and wishes that he could stop there, but of course he can’t.
Nevertheless, she believes he’s getting better. When he begins to root around in the byways of the injustice, to concentrate on something like the stolen letter, it means he’s probably getting better.
With a little encouragement, a little shift in his attention, he could perhaps fall in love with her. This has happened with a couple of patients, before now. Both were married. But that did not keep her from sleeping with them, after they were discharged. By that time, however, feelings were altered. The men felt gratitude, she felt goodwill, both of them felt some sort of misplaced nostalgia.
Not that she regrets it. There’s very little now that she regrets. Certainly not her sexual life, which has been sporadic and secret but, on the whole, comforting. The effort she put into keeping it secret was perhaps hardly necessary, seeing how people had made up their minds about her—the people she knew now had done that just as thoroughly and mistakenly as the people she knew long ago.
Coral hands her a printout.
“Not much,” she says.
Robin thanks her and folds it and takes it to the closet, to put it into her purse. She wants to be alone when she reads it. But she can’t wait till she gets home. She goes down to the Quiet Room, which used to be the Prayer Room. Nobody was in there being quiet at the moment.
Adzic, Alexander. Born July 3, 1924, Bjelojevici, Yugoslavia. Emigrated Canada, May 29, 1962, care of brother Danilo Adzic, born Bjelojevici, July 3, 1924, Canadian citizen.
Alexander Adzic lived with his brother Danilo until the latter’s death Sept 7, 1995. He was admitted to Perth County Long Term Care Facility Sept 25, 1995, and has been a patient there since that date.
Alexander Adzic apparently has been deaf-mute since birth or from illness shortly after. No Special Education Facilities available as a child. I.Q. never determined but he was trained to work at clock repairs. No training in sign language. Dependent on brother and to all appearances emotionally inaccessible otherwise. Apathy, no appetite, occasional hostility, general regression since admission.
Outrageous.
Brothers.
Twins.
Robin wants to set this piece of paper in front of someone, some authority.
This is ridiculous. This I do not accept.
Nevertheless.
Shakespeare should have prepared her. Twins are often the reason for mix-ups and disasters in Shakespeare. A means to an end, those tricks are supposed to be. And in the end the mysteries are solved, the pranks are forgiven, true love or something like it is rekindled, and those who were fooled have the good grace not to complain.
He must have gone out on an errand. A brief errand. He would not leave that brother in charge for very long. Perhaps the screen door was hooked—she had never tried to push it open. Perhaps he had told his brother to hook it and not open it while he himself was giving Juno a walk around the block. She had wondered why Juno wasn’t there.
If she had come a little later. A little earlier. If she had stayed till the play was over or skipped the play altogether. If she had not bothered with her hair.
And then? How could they have managed, he with Alexander and she with Joanne? By the way Alexander behaved on that day, it did not look as if he would have put up with any intrusion, any changes. And Joanne would certainly have suffered. Less perhaps from having the deaf-mute Alexander in the house than from Robin’s marriage to a foreigner.
Hard now to credit, the way things were then.
It was all spoiled in one day, in a couple of minutes, not by fits and starts, struggles, hopes and losses, in the long-drawn-out way that such things are more often spoiled. And if it’s true that things are usually spoiled, isn’t the quick way the easier way to bear?
But you don’t really take that view, not for yourself. Robin doesn’t. Even now she can yearn for her chance. She is not going to spare a moment’s gratitude for the trick that has been played. But she’ll come round to being grateful for the discovery of it. That, at least—the discovery which leaves everything whole, right up to the moment of frivolous intervention. Leaves you outraged, but warmed from a distance, clear of shame.
That was another world they had been in, surely. As much as any world concocted on the stage. Their flimsy arrangement, their ceremony of kisses, the foolhardy faith enveloping them that everything would sail ahead as planned. Move an inch this way or that, in such a case, and you’re lost.
Robin has had patients who believe that combs and toothbrushes must lie in the right order, shoes must face in the right direction, steps must be counted, or some sort of punishment will follow.
If she has failed in that department, it would be in the matter of the green dress. Because of the woman at the cleaners, the sick child, she wore the wrong green dress.
She wished she could tell somebody. Him.