Things as They Are (20 page)

On the other hand, her second day back, in the midst of working through an arithmetic problem at the blackboard she lost her train of thought, her eyes suddenly brimmed with tears, and she flung the piece of chalk in her hand to the floor, crying out, “What’s the use! What’s the
point
!” and left the room, not to return until after the mid-morning recess.

I knew teacher had read my letter. I knew this because two
or three times a period she would appear beside my desk and stand there for a full minute or so. At those times I could not shake the feeling that she was about to speak, would speak, if I so much as looked her in the face. For this reason I kept my head lowered and my gaze fastened on the red rubber tip of the cane until it moved off, squashily punching the floor.

Mrs. Dollen took to smiling at me. She smiled each time she called my name off the roll, a strange contortion of the lips. It had been months since she had called on me in class, even for purposes of humiliation, but now there were questions for me again, easy ones, accompanied by the smile. She smiled at me coming in and going out of class. There was something coaxing in it, something that made me feel I was being lured out into the open the easier to be torn apart. And each time she smiled I shrank a little more, waiting for the coming of my just desserts.

Teacher had been back about a week when she put it to me. This time she stood a little longer by my desk than was usual and in the end touched me on the shoulder, forcing me to look up, blinking, into her face.

“I’ve been thinking that you would like to move back up to the front of the room,” she said. “Would you, Myles? Would you like that?”

Across the aisle Leszinski was tensely listening.

I did not answer her.

“What you have to understand, Myles, is that I put you back here so that you could learn something. And I think you have, I’m sure you have. Have you, Myles?” She smiled and suddenly I recognized it for what it was. The false smile of the coward, the very one I had offered her so many times in the past months to disarm contempt.

“All I want you to say, Myles, is that you have learned your lesson and you can go back to the front of the room. But I can’t know you’ve learned your lesson unless I hear you say that you have. That’s only fair, isn’t it? That you let me know you’ve learned your lesson?”

I did not answer.

“Do you understand, Myles? All you have to do is let me know that you’ve learned your lesson. Just say it. Just say, ‘I’ve learned my lesson’ and you can go back to your old place.”

It didn’t matter how nicely she wheedled. It didn’t matter how hard her blunt fingers tightened on my shoulder, how hard she shook me, slapped me, I would not say it. The child could never go back.

EVERY MORNING WHEN THE ALARM
went off sharp at eight o’clock, Mrs. Cora Rook swung her skinny legs out of bed, snatched the binoculars from the bedside table, and in a state of dread rushed out of the bedroom and into the living room in her fuchsia negligee. There at the window of her tenth-floor condominium she pursed a mouth smeared with the lipstick she had forgotten to wash off when she had gone to bed drunk the night before and offered up a silent, panicked prayer as she struggled to focus her field glasses on the Bank of Montreal branch on Second Avenue. One of Mrs. Cora Rook’s myriad fears was that overnight the bank would burn and all the money she had on deposit there would go up in flames, bankrupting her. Thank God! It was still there!

Cora’s understanding of financial questions was rather shaky. Her husband Len, owner of a successful chain of six dry-cleaning outlets which he had sold shortly before his death almost two years ago, had been the money expert. While he was alive she had simply abdicated all control to him. “Oh, interest and taxes – I don’t want to get involved in all that.”

But now the situation was changed. Now it was her money to worry about – not Len’s – an onerous responsibility, a weight on her mind. What made it worse was that unlike some of the other widows she knew, she had no children to lean
upon for support and advice in her hour of need. All alone as she was in the world, who could she turn to? It was difficult for her to forget Len’s stories of what a dog-eat-dog world it was out there. How often she had heard him say, “The cleaning business is the dirtiest business in the world. Everybody is out to cheat you. If I wasn’t on my toes a hundred per cent of the time, the bastards would have put us in the poor house ages ago.

If Mrs. Cora Rook was sure of anything, it was that the poor house was one place she did not want to go. She did her best not to put herself there, acting on whichever of Len’s economic principles she might be able to recall. “Buy in quantity. There’s always a saving in bulk,” had been one of his favourites. It was the reason she always purchased her scotch by the case load rather than the bottle. Writing cheques had always thrown her for a loop so Len had given her an allowance in cash and out of habit she continued the former cash-only policy, going to her bank three or four times a week to make withdrawals. When the tellers saw her come sailing through the doors they gave each other significant looks to which Cora was oblivious.

Reg Stamp couldn’t believe how hot it was for ten-thirty in the morning. Heat always made him edgy. He couldn’t keep still. His restless hands kept flitting about, tugging at his cuffs, tightening the knot of his tie, stroking his shirt front. Every few minutes he walked to the florist’s window to anxiously inspect himself.

What the glass reflected was a middle-aged male retaining a little of the surly insolence of someone once very attractive to women. But that had been a long time ago, in the days before the Beatles when Ricky Nelson and Fabian were the beau ideal, soft-looking, baby-faced men – “cute” was the word girls used back then to describe them. Cute does not always wear well. And Reg Stamp was badly worn. His dirty-blond hair was thinning, his swollen face was an alarming pink. Troy
Donahue drowned, bloated, washed up on a beach. However, Reg was blind to his puffy desolation, he was gazing approvingly upon the grey three-piece recently purchased at Bay Day. The pen in the breast pocket was pure brilliance, the telling detail which inspires confidence in the beholder. The shoes were great too. Like the suit they were new, but he had polished them anyway, then propped his toes up against a wall and flexed them a hundred times to crease the leather and give them that used, lived-in look. A lot of guys disregarded the small particulars, arguing: Who ever notices? But Reg sincerely believed that you couldn’t make a convincing pitch unless you were prepared to climb into the skin of the person you said you were. And that meant living the part right down to broken-in shoes and a pen in the breast pocket of your suit. He had even read a book about it called
An Actor Prepares
. He prided himself on his professionalism. He knew what he was doing.

Despite his thoroughness, Reg’s nerves were acting up dreadfully. This was happening more and more frequently of late. Since the bank had opened its doors at ten o’clock, he had let at least a dozen prospects go by. Furious, he put the blame on the hot weather. Along with a rash on his ass, it always gave him second thoughts.

But when he saw
her
, no more second thoughts. She was what a hanging slider is to a hitter in a bad slump, the dippy old broad in the turban sort of hat with a brooch the size of a small hub cap pinned to the front of it. And a cape. Who the fuck did she think she was, Super Senior? “Head ’em up and move ’em out, Reg,” he whispered to himself. “Corral that loon.” He put on a smile as big as the great outdoors and glided up to her. When he caught a whiff of her breath he knew he was in like Flynn. Whisky. At ten-thirty in the morning.

For sheer sordidness, Mrs. Cora Rook had never heard the like. Dear, clever Len had been righter than right, the world was filled with the “grifters,” “hyenas,” and “vampires” she
so often heard him curse, drink in hand after a hard day’s work.

Cora was rather pleased with herself for guessing which one was the ring leader: the rude girl with the big boobies who had made excuses about not wanting to fill out her withdrawal slip for her a number of months ago, claiming that the sign clearly said Commercial Teller and that she was holding up the line. The true nature of those types was apparent to anyone with eyes in their head.

Of course, she didn’t quite understand it all, the ins and outs, the whys and wherefores, all the computer flibbertigibbet of money transferred out of one account and into another and then, finally, into someone else’s pockets. What she understood perfectly was that it involved stealing her money, the money that Len had worked so hard to leave her. The bank investigator had left no doubt on that score.

The bank inspector was a charming man, so simpatico. Sitting in the donut shop drinking coffee, it had seemed the most natural thing in the world to tell him how difficult it was to be widowed and childless and how distressing it was to learn that the people you had put your trust in, bank people, were fleecing you. Even if she hadn’t had a personal interest in the case she would have been inclined to help such a nice, agreeable man. Tomorrow, when she took delivery of the incriminating bills that had been marked with invisible ink so that the embezzlers could be traced and identified, she was sure she would feel a little bit like Mata Hari.

Reg had suggested that she hand over the money in her apartment. No way did he want to be seen receiving a wad of bills in a donut shop from a batty old broad. Eleven o’clock found him in a phone booth located across from the bank. He watched her come out. As far as he could see nobody was tailing her.

Now he was on his way to grandmother’s house and still half-expecting to meet up with the wolf. He was also kicking
himself. Yesterday, when she had asked how much she should take out of her account, he had quoted the usual – a thousand. In his experience that was the old girls’ upper limit, even a measly thousand often gave them serious second thoughts. You suggested any more and they developed circulation problems, came down with a case of cold feet. So naturally he had gone with standard operating procedure.

She hadn’t batted an eyelash. It would have been all the same to her if he had asked for two thousand, maybe three thousand. He had no one to blame but himself for misreading the situation. That’s what came from not paying attention. Paying attention counted in this business. The cape and the weird headgear had thrown him – naturally he hadn’t associated big money with someone who looked like a refugee from the church rummage sale. The upshot was he hadn’t spotted the rings on her fingers until he’d already made the suggestion she withdraw a thousand. Seven rings.
Serious
rings, lighting up those gnarly old fingers like a Christmas tree, sparking and winking whenever they moved in the light.

Reg paused outside her building. He had to collect himself, was finding it hard to catch his breath. What was happening to him? He was turning into a bona fide shell-shock case. Last night he had hardly slept for speculating on what might go wrong. For the last five or six blocks he had been glancing over his shoulder every few seconds, to see if he was being followed. But if they wanted to nab him, ten to one they were waiting inside. With that happy thought he began to drip sweat,
rain
sweat for chrissakes. Sure as shit, he was working up an ulcer. His stomach hurt. Maybe worse than an ulcer. Hadn’t he read somewhere that you could give yourself cancer, bottling up your emotions?