Jack of Diamonds (21 page)

Miss Frostbite wasn’t in her apartment when I called around, so I decided I’d catch up with her later when I came on shift that afternoon. I could arrive fifteen minutes early. It wasn’t one of my mom’s cleaning days so I’d stay and have lunch with her.

When I got home Mom kissed me then pointed to the kitchen sideboard. ‘Note there for you, Jack.’

‘From?’

She shrugged. ‘How should I know?’

‘Mom!’ I said somewhat pointedly. ‘You’re talking to me, your beloved son Jack, who’s been with you seventeen years, remember?’ It was nice being able to answer back after the verbal hiding I’d taken from Joe Hockey.

‘It’s from Mac.’

‘And?’

‘He wants to meet you after you get out from work tonight. He’ll be waiting outside the Jazz Warehouse.’

‘Did he say why?’

‘No, just that. Read it for yourself.’

‘Thanks, Mom. Can you make a cuppa? I need to talk with you about something that happened this morning.’

‘Oh, Jack! They’ve fired you over breaking them cocktail glasses, haven’t they!’

‘No, Mom. It’s about a long talk I had with Uncle Joe this morning. Make the tea and I’ll tell you.’

She made a jam sandwich and a cup of tea for each of us, and we ate lunch and I told her about going west and scuffing.

‘Scuffing? It don’t sound very nice, Jack. What is it exactly?’ my mom asked, looking anxious.

‘Gaining experience, moving around, learning how to stay alive. You know, feeling the pressure of making a living, getting exposed to the world outside, learning about life by playing music,’ I explained.

‘Don’t them things happen here in Cabbagetown every day?’ She was now beginning to look decidedly upset.

I explained how, in Joe’s opinion, it was essential if I wanted to become a jazz piano player. But, long before I’d finished speaking, the tears began to roll silently down her cheeks. I didn’t tell her about Joe’s lecture on survival and finding a job playing music in the army because, despite what Joe said, I still wasn’t sure I wouldn’t be dodging my duty.

Finally, when I fell silent, she sniffed and used the backs of her hands, like a little girl might do, to brush away the tears. ‘Oh, Jack, you’re going to go west then return and join the army, and you might die,’ she sniffed.

There it was again, the war and dying. ‘Mom, who knows? The war might be over by then, for all we know. Lots of people are saying it might.’ I’d been so busy telling her about scuffing that I hadn’t given a thought to her. I was all she had in the world. Once I left she’d be on her own and terribly lonely. Sometimes the plans we make for ourselves have consequences for others we can’t do a lot about, but I felt sure that in her mind she’d calculated on my being with her until I turned eighteen, when I’d be off to the war. The news of my departure would have come as a nasty shock.

‘I hope so, Jack. I do hope so, but the prime minister says we need to prepare for a long conflict, and he’s right about most things,’ she said softly.

I’d always planned that some day I’d hit the trail and kick the dust, or plough through the slush and snow of the Canadian prairies, but I’d seen this happening later in my life, maybe after I’d returned from the war. It was one of those
sometime whenever and possibly never
ambitions we all carry in our heads, often into our dotage, like sailing singlehanded around the world in a 30-foot yacht or climbing in the Himalayas, or dog-sledding across Alaska, or some other wild dream of the ultimate adventure. I’d often enough ‘gone west’ in my imagination and I’d read half a zillion books set in the Canadian prairies, Alaska and the Yukon. Canada was a vast country – I owed it to myself to explore it.

However, once his ‘do it now’ advice had sunk in I realised Joe Hockey was right about leaving the primary influences in my life and heading westwards. I had only left my mom’s side for two nights in my entire seventeen years, when Miss Bates and I had travelled overnight by train to Montreal to a piano competition. Travelling overnight on a train in effect meant I hadn’t really seen anything more than railway stations on the way, and a bit of Montreal going from the station to the concert hall, and returning in the early evening to the station.

While my excitement mounted at the prospect of heading west, it was nonetheless a somewhat scary notion to drop everything and head out of town with nothing in my back pocket but a battered harmonica. But the more I thought about it the more I began to embrace the idea. I’d been on a strict schedule since the age of seven and I’d largely lost the sense of careless, casual and intrepid adventure a boy of my age might possess. Even the girls often kicked over the traces. For instance, the twins had fulfilled Mac’s worst fears by leaving school at sixteen despite, according to their teachers, being exceptionally bright. They’d left Toronto for Montreal to work for Dolly’s sister in her fish-and-chip shop. Seven years later they’d returned from their various adventures in an altogether different feminine guise from the lowly one their mother had envisaged for them as well-trained working-class women, at the lower end of the social pecking order: equipped to mind children, change nappies, cook and scrub other people’s kitchen floors in return for a daily pittance and the breakfast, lunch and dinner leftovers.

The Depression had left the rich both greedy and mean. With so many near-destitute women to choose from, for the most part they treated their domestics like slaves. But the twins had envisaged their working lives differently and, judging from their looks and the way they behaved, they had rarely scrubbed floors when they’d been down on their knees.

I’d learned of their return to Toronto in the final months of my senior matriculation. Occasionally a kitchen hand would fail to turn up and I’d work the last half of a shift washing dishes and clearing glasses from the tables. The head waiter who’d instructed me had emphasised, ‘You lift the empty glass from the table when the patron’s attention is some other place, on the stage or talking to someone; now it’s there and then it isn’t. You’re the glass ghost, Jack.’ Like my mom, I didn’t want any payment, but at the end of the week if I’d done an extra half shift, Miss Frostbite would add a couple of dollars to my streetcar fare. It was usual for someone doing my job to put on a waiter’s long apron for ten minutes every hour to enter the club and retrieve the dirty glasses. Washing and polishing cocktail glasses was my main job. It was on one such occasional shift that I saw the twins for the first time since they’d left. Surprise wasn’t the right word for how I felt. I almost dropped the tray of glasses I was carrying. Both were with men much older than themselves, and I knew immediately that it wasn’t simply because the twins preferred the company of older men.

If I seem to have pre-judged them, I assure you, one didn’t need to be Einstein to know what was going on. The heavy make-up, revealing dresses and high heels, the highly suggestive dancing, told you all you needed to know about the profession they’d decided to pursue.

We’d ignored each other like always, but this time it was a management instruction. They were patrons and the rule was that the hired help only responded if first spoken to – collecting glasses was a silent and hopefully unobtrusive operation. The twins either hadn’t recognised me or they didn’t let on.

Now, with the last of my pimples finally gone, I was big, somewhat clumsy and, when it came to young women, more than a little naïve. Their presence intimidated me more than it ever had in the stairwell at home. I prayed that they’d maintain their aloofness or that my glass ghosting was so good they wouldn’t see me. Then on one occasion – I remember it was on the second-last night before the regular dishwasher returned – Melissa or Clarissa had winked at me and the following night had blown me a silent kiss. I have to admit that on both occasions I could feel my face burning and the cocktail glasses on the tray I carried set off a clinking tintinnabulation as my hands started to shake.

Even just looking at them filled me with lust and longing. The nasty teenage brats who had once shouldered me aside in the passageway with the words, ‘Oops, sorry! Didn’t see you,’ had undergone a metamorphosis and turned into two identical but astonishingly sexy creatures. Alas, I confess, I lay in bed at night in what had once been my dad’s bedroom, aching with the mental image I’d carried home of a pair of scarlet lips blowing me a kiss, my overheated imagination finally no longer able to resist the dark impulses that had my heart thumping and set my hand to doing its urgent relief work.

Two spectacular and identical new young creatures appearing on the Toronto nightclub scene didn’t pass without comment and I learned that they’d bought a nice apartment downtown and paid cash for it. Rumour had it that you didn’t bother to call them unless you were filthy rich. The fact that the men on whose arms they appeared were never young and handsome seemed to confirm this, and despite the Depression, they would invariably summon the cocktail waiter who’d served them, then make a point of being seen to tip him a five-dollar bill, in those hard times a very big gratuity. I was more interested in watching each of the girls leave, sashaying along with the delicious bounce of firm buttocks under a tight silk dress, the sight of which drained most of the blood in my body to a central location.

On one occasion, when I’d been fairly close and was watching Melissa or Clarissa leave unobserved, she’d suddenly stopped within earshot of where I was standing, tugged at the sleeve of her partner’s suit jacket, and said, ‘You forgot to tip the cocktail waiter!’ Her voice carried easily to the surrounding tables, and I noticed something else – they’d left behind the argot of Cabbagetown and assumed awfully swanky accents.

‘Oh, ah . . . next time,’ the guy grunted, clearly embarrassed. You could see he wasn’t accustomed to being pulled into line.

‘No! Now!’ Clarissa or Melissa demanded. ‘He’s probably got a wife and kids at home.’

The man had called the cocktail waiter over and, grunting, slipped him a five. So, I had to hand it to whichever twin she was, she had guts and hadn’t entirely forgotten her humble beginnings.

A week or so later Mac was waiting outside the club when I came out of Miss Frostbite’s piano room after the last bit of early-evening practice. ‘We knocked off early ’cause the foreman had to go to a funeral, so I dropped around for the jam and thought we might walk home together,’ he suggested. Even though I had the money to pay the streetcar fare for both of us, it seemed like a nice idea. Any time spent with Mac was time well spent. He was more a buddy than a mentor these days, and while I’d ask for advice, I had no qualms giving it as well. This was perhaps partly because of his size – by now he could have fitted neatly under my outstretched arm.

Shortly after we’d set out for home he announced, ‘The twins are back in town.’

‘Hey, that’s nice for you,’ I replied, not telling him that I already knew.

‘Hmm, not sure about that,’ he mumbled, but explained no further. Mac was a proud man in his own way and as we both had lots to talk about, we went on to other topics. He hoped to join up, and said with one of his rare laughs, ‘Jack, fighting the Germans won’t be nothing after all my years living with Dolly.’

I would have loved to know what Dolly thought about her recently returned daughters, who, as it were, now worked under the flip side of the quilts she’d taught them to make. Naturally I never mentioned their regular appearance in the club to Mac. I wondered why he’d come to see me after my shift. It must have been fairly urgent or he’d have waited until the next time we met, which we made a point of doing at least once a week, even if sometimes only briefly.

It was late September and while there was a definite nip in the air, it was nice being out of the steaming kitchen, where I’d spent most of the night up to my elbows in soapsuds. We’d barely got underway when Mac said, ‘Jack, I want to ask your advice. The twins have come up with something.’

Apart from the disconcerted mumble when he’d first told me they’d arrived back in town, Mac had never mentioned them to me again, correctly assuming, I expect, that there was little to tell me I didn’t already know.

‘What is it, Mac?’

‘They want Dolly and me to move into a garden apartment they’ve bought in High Park North. But I don’t know that it’s such a good idea. It’s a pretty snooty neighbourhood, as you know, and I’m not at all sure it’s for such as Dolly and me. It seems they made a bit of money in Montreal and with houses and apartments now cheap as chips they wanted us to own our own place.’

‘That’s nice, Mac, that’s real nice,’ I replied.

‘Yes, but you see they’ve given us a choice. They’ve also bought the house in Cabbagetown. We can stay there if we want.’

My heart sank. Whatever happened, Dolly would give us the instant shove and my mom would have nowhere to go. ‘Dolly know all this?’

‘Yeah, but for once she can’t make up her mind. She’s got all her friends in Cabbagetown.’

‘No, what I meant was about the twins owning our house?’

Mac looked taken aback. ‘Jack, buddy, what do you take me for? I’ve made them promise that whatever happens you can stay until the end of the war. You see, we either stay put or it’s an investment for later, that’s why they bought it in the first place.’ Then he added as an afterthought, ‘They know they can’t sell it now, and you’re actually doing them a favour by paying rent.’

‘Thanks, Mac, I’m grateful. Mind if I don’t tell my mom for now?’