“Goodbye, Ginger honey,” says Teresa at the kitchen door, “drive safe.”
Teresa washes the glasses and Frances pads away down the cellar steps. Part of her story is true. And part of it is true enough. Frances will find out where he lives and buy herself a case of ginger beer.
She shimmies up the coal chute and out into a stab of sunlight.
Ginger has seen a little girl on the Shore Road between New Waterford and Sydney. She strays along the edge of the ditch looking every place but where she’s going. Why is she allowed to wander the highway alone like that and why is she not in school? Who’s her father? Where’s her mother? She always wears a Girl Guide uniform, which is strange because she doesn’t look old enough to be a Girl Guide, more like a Brownie.
The third time Ginger passes, they’re both travelling in the same direction and he slows down a little, thinking maybe to offer her a ride, but he decides against it, not wanting to frighten her. She looks up, though, at the slowing truck ahead, and he sees her face in the side mirror. It hurts him. Who would let their little girl walk the Shore Road alone day after day? He never would. He has three daughters: two Brownies and one Guide.
He shivers and drives on. He glances at the St Christopher medal hanging from his rearview mirror. Ginger has never had an accident, he is a good driver, but lately he has felt funny about the road. He used to see it all at once and drive as naturally as blinking and breathing, but now it’s as though he sees each piece of road individually the moment his wheels roll over it. To either side, each stone and tree stands separately, and he has lost the knack of expecting the road to unfurl around the bend. Driving is his living — he can’t afford to be spooked.
Ever since his last trip to New York Ginger hasn’t felt right. Never quite rested, or quite awake. It’s as though a window has been left open inside his head, admitting a draft. He can’t get to it to close it. But he can look out it, even though all he sees is fog. It rolls into his mind, obscuring his ease, setting him to shiver. Still, he looks and looks. Because out there in the fog he can feel something looking back at him.
His wife, Adelaide, knows there is something not right but how can Ginger explain to her what he cannot explain to himself? He heard some music in New York. That sounds crazy, he knows it, so the least he can do is keep it to himself. Can music cast a spell? Yes. Everyone knows that. And everyone would laugh at him if he said it out loud.
It was in a club up in Harlem. Ginger had time on his hands waiting for a shipment of dresses to haul back to Mahmoud’s Department Store on Pitt Street. Whenever Ginger is in a place that’s filled with other black people it’s as though he is relieved of a weight that he was unaware of until it came off him. He walked up Lenox Avenue feeling light. In Harlem Ginger felt happy but lonely too. Home and not home. He entered a small club on 135th Street that welcomed Negroes in the audience, not just on stage. A trio was playing quiet music for a quiet crowd. The whole scene was highly unusual. No floor show, no horns or hi-de-ho. Piano, bass and flute. Ginger stood and listened.
The piano player was at the core of the trio. A slim man with long fine fingers, hand-tooled wrists. So good that he had come to prefer playing between the music. This was not for everyone and the pianist hadn’t had a new suit in a very long time. Threadbare trousers, white shirt open at the long handsome throat. A charcoal fedora angled low, and round its base a shimmering green silk band.
Three minutes or three hours later, Ginger recognized the number as “Honeysuckle Rose,” but this did not prevent him from confusing his left arm with his right when he went to lift his glass of beer. The odd thing was, Ginger had homey taste in music. If it could be sung by the whole family, it was great by him. He certainly didn’t claim to be any kind of connoisseur. And yet when the pianist allowed his fingers to settle like mist onto the keys for the next interstellar tune, Ginger had to stay and listen.
It was on the night drive back up to Cape Breton that he became aware of the fault line opening inside his head, and twice he had to remind himself to stop when the land ended: once because it was time to coast onto the ferry, and once again because he was home. He hugged Adelaide as though she were the first solid food he’d had in weeks.
Still, he hasn’t been able to shake the unease, and sights like the lost little Girl Guide are bothering him perhaps even more than they normally would. The third time he sees her, Ginger means to tell Adelaide, but it slips his mind only to return that night in a dream. He sees the thin white face in the side mirror up close — the serious brown green eyes, one freckle on the nose. It still looks like a child, but an unspeakably old one. It is the saddest face he has ever seen. Ginger wakes up even though it’s not a nightmare. For the first time it occurs to him that the little Girl Guide may be a ghost. What is she saying to him with her eyes? “Here is how I died…. Pray for me.” Ginger wipes his face — it’s wet but none of the rest of him is so it couldn’t have been a night sweat. How strange. He goes and checks on all his children in their beds. When he returns he looks down at his rusty-haired wife, who appears ready for a fight even in her sleep. Thank God for Adelaide.
Ginger means to tell his sister Teresa about the little Girl Guide and about his dream the next day at lunch when he brings Mr Mahmoud his ginger-beer treat, but again it slips his mind.
Jameel squints down at Frances. “What for?”
“Just tell me.”
Frances has awakened him in the middle of the day, he’s jaundiced as the sun.
“Why?”
“Because I’ll burn your fuckin house down if you don’t.”
Jameel horks out last night’s nicotine. “You just watch yourself, that’s all I’m sayin, Leo Taylor’s got a mean wife.”
“It’s not his wife I’m interested in.”
“He lives in the purple house on Tupper Street.”
Frances turns to leave; Jameel shakes his head and warns, “Just don’t come cryin to me.”
But she ignores him.
Ginger Taylor gets a jolt when he looks up from the shell in his youngest child’s hand to see the little Girl Guide standing in his back yard staring at him. She is a ghost. What does she want?
“May I have some of your ginger beer?”
Adelaide comes to the back door. “What do you want?”
Frances looks up at her. The woman’s reddish hair indicates to Frances the ability to see through people. Best not to answer.
Adelaide doesn’t take her eyes off Frances. “Who is she, Ginger?”
“I don’t know, honey.” Then he turns back to Frances, “What’s your name, little girl?”
Frances walks away. The child moves to follow her but Ginger picks him up.
Adelaide and Ginger watch Frances trail off down the alley, then Adelaide says, “That’s not a little girl.” And walks back into the house.
Salt
The first thing Mahmoud notices is that one of the sterling combs is missing. That leads him to the rosewood jewellery box. He opens it. An empty metal post pops up and rotates to the strains of “The Anniversary Waltz”. The box is bare but for the pearls. Shaking with disbelief, he snatches them up — they slide down their severed string and spray across the floor.
“Teresa!” he roars.
She’s up in an instant, wiping her hands, white grains of burghul clinging to them — she’s making kibbeh — and the next instant she’s lucky he hasn’t called the police; “Get your things and go.”
Mahmoud contacts his youngest daughter and she organizes a bucket brigade of female relatives. The family is hugely attentive anyway, but full-time housekeeping for an old man is another matter. They’ll have to find a paid replacement because Mahmoud’s family is so successful that there are no spare females lying around.
A line of Irish girls and Coloured girls and country girls is paraded before him but Mahmoud can’t seem to decide on a new Teresa, so it falls to Camille to take up most of the slack. She is the closest thing to a widow there is.
br /> What enrages Mahmoud is that he let himself be lulled into trusting Teresa — into thinking she was different. That’s when the viper strikes. He should never have forgotten her colour. They can be the nicest people in the world but, like children, they mustn’t be overburdened with responsibility. They’re like the worser sort of woman in that way, even the men — which reminds me, I wonder if the brother was in cahoots.
It’s enormously aggravating at Mahmoud’s age to have to explain every little thing to each of the female relatives looking after him. They all do their best but the evil truth is, none of them knows him like Teresa did. And — this is the most evil truth — none of them makes Lebanese food as beautifully as she did. Better than his own wife, God rest her soul and God forgive me. Teresa seemed to read his mind. She made everything so easy. And Mahmoud knew that, when the time came, he could have accepted her most intimate ministrations without yielding a particle of his dignity. Now that is a good woman. And what is her price? Above rubies. Damn it. What were a few trinkets in exchange for that? He’d have willingly given her the whole kit ’n’ caboodle, every bauble and — what am I thinking? I’m a foolish old man. And what is my price? An ass if I’m not careful. I need my daughters at a time like this, my own flesh and blood, this just goes to show it.
It wounds Mahmoud to observe that the thefts do not end with the departure of Teresa. They resume under the increasingly continuous care of his daughter Camille.
Mahmoud blames himself. In the Old Country he never would have given a daughter to Jameel, because there the crucial distinction between their two families would have been clear. The Jameels are Arabs. We Mahmouds are more Mediterranean. Closer to being European, really. Such distinctions are apt to get blurred in the new country, where you open wide your arms to a brother from home who speaks the same beautiful language as you. The same shapely humorous language with earth and water in it. What a relief it is to sit down to a meal or a game of cards with someone, a Jameel for example, who shares this language. What a relief from the chill of English, which is exactly like immersing your tongue in ice-water. And after all, to the enklese you are all “black Syrians”. Mahmoud didn’t recognize until too late that his Old Country standards had eroded to the point where he had given his most beautiful daughter to a dirty half-civilized Arab. Poor Camille, a good girl who has borne sons only, and five of them — what a waste. And he’s lost Teresa to boot.
Tears are shed by Mahmoud sitting next to his bed. He has come up here to get away from a bungling granddaughter. He sits in the skirted chair that matches the bedclothes — Giselle’s taste, French provincial, God rest her soul — and his eyes fall upon the carved mahogany reproduction of Dürer’s Praying Hands hanging on the wall. My wife bought that. A distant tremor for Giselle gives way to hot tears because they are Teresa’s hands.
Go ahead, cry it out and be done with it. Then get down on your knees and thank God that your daughter Camille has been polluted by her no-good Arab husband into a petty thief, and that you fired Teresa for Camille’s crime. Thank God, because you know that otherwise, and not too long from now, you would have asked Teresa to marry you.
Mahmoud slides from the chair and clunks to the floor on his knees. It must have been God who intervened when the pearls went flying, because if Mahmoud had been thinking for himself he never would have believed the thief could be a woman to whom he had entrusted the housekeeping money every week for the past fifteen years. It was God speaking straight out of his mouth. Thank you. Infinite wisdom, infinite mercy, I am not worthy.
Mahmoud kneels and weeps into his own praying hands. Beneath the bed, Frances listens, fascinated.
Teresa is crying too, but with anger. She sits on the loveseat in her home under the hand-tinted photograph of Bridgetown and wonders what she’s going to do now. Worse than the loss of her job is the loss of her reputation. And what is its price? To have been unjustly accused. And of something so far beneath her and everything she comes from. How dare he? Hateful old man. Like all the rest only worse. Nasty, low-down, filthy Syrian — oh sweet Lord, I am trying but You make it hard. How is it possible to forgive and to live at the same time?
It always ends this way: not-coloured people can’t stand it when a coloured person gets too good at something. Teresa blames herself for believing that she was indispensable to Mahmoud. Pride goeth before a fall. She did everything for him. She remembered all the names and all the birthdays of all his grandchildren, and shopped for the endless stream of presents that bore his name. She remembered which son liked what dish and cooked accordingly when they came for supper. She knew when to mend a sock and when to throw it out, where he had left his diamond tie-pin and his reading glasses, she banked his money, paid his bills and soothed his corns. If she hadn’t done her job so well Mahmoud would not have resented her and fired her on a vicious lie. Yes he would. He’d have fired her for being lazy “like the rest of your people”. It ends the same way no matter what, leaving you to suck salt and pray Jesus to take away the hate.
Hector reaches over and brushes away a tear, which causes her to weep afresh. They have been married thirteen years. All day long Hector sits faithfully under his blanket waiting for her to come home. Thank the Lord for Ginger, Adelaide and their kids, thank God for good neighbours, otherwise Hector would have died of loneliness by now.
Hector wasn’t fired, he was never unjustly accused of anything and, unlike dear Ginger, he never resorted to making a living through illegal means. Hector had a good job at the steel plant. He and Teresa were married fourteen months when a half-cooked beam fell and caught him on the side of the head. Now he can go for little walks if you hold his hand, but mostly he gets pushed along in his wheelchair.
Hector and Teresa had put off having children because he was going to be a minister and they were going to move to New York City and have American children and a better life. Teresa pats Hector’s hand, then goes to fetch a fresh diaper for him from the linen closet. She long ago gave up imagining what their children would have looked like.
Jameel barges into Boutros’s bedroom on the second floor and says, “Tell Leo Taylor to come here tonight and bring a case of ginger beer.”
Boutros turns from his open window and says, “I’ll pick it up myself, Pa.”
“Shutup and do what I say.”
“How come?”
Jameel reaches up and clips Boutros a sharp one on the back of the head, “That’s how come.”
“Ow.”
Jameel laughs and explains, “Your cousin wants him, b’y.”
Boutros doesn’t say anything. Jameel shakes his head, Jesus, I have to spell everything out for this kid, takes after his mother — “Queen a’ Sheba, friggin Frances, b’y, she’s after his black arse.”
Boutros is trembling. With someone as big as Boutros, it’s hard to tell. He is nineteen. Soon he won’t be able to stop himself from belting his father. Jameel laughs at Boutros, grabs his big face in both hands, squashes the cheeks together and slaps him affectionately. “Do what I say, go on.”
Jameel leaves and Boutros turns back to his open window. He picks up a battered oilcan from the ledge and finishes watering his marigolds and petunias.
The name Boutros means Peter. And Peter means rock. And upon this rock, Jameel has built his booze can. It is Boutros’s curse to be the eldest. He has four younger brothers. Most of them are just like Jameel and therefore well suited to being the eldest, except for the middle brother, who is obviously headed for the priesthood. Boutros dreams of saving enough money to buy a farm; of marrying his cousin Frances and taking her and his mother, Camille, away to the country, where they would all be happy. They’d have a lot of children and he would love them all, but especially he would love his wife, and make his mother’s last years the happiest of her life. Frances is a painted drunken whore on the outside but Boutros sees through that because he loves her and, one day soon, intends to save her.
“Pa wants you to come tonight and bring a cas
e of ginger beer.”
Ginger looks up at Boutros filling the doorway. Adelaide calls from the kitchen, “Take it yourself, buddy.”
“Puppa says for mister to come.”
“It’s okay, Addy, I won’t be long.” Ginger goes for his jacket.
“Not now,” says Boutros, “tonight after midnight.”
“What for?” Adelaide wants to know.
“I don’t know, Mrs Taylor, Pa says.”
“It’ll cost him,” says Adelaide, pouring some hot into Teresa’s cup — Adelaide’s been making mincemeat pies and offering to beat the can off old Mahmoud.
Ginger says to Boutros, “Tell him I’ll be there.” But Boutros doesn’t leave right away. He remains for a moment, looking down at Ginger. Finally he turns and goes without a word.
“Did you see that?” Ginger asks the women, returning to the kitchen table. “Gawking at me like I was a ghost?”
“That whole family’s right nuts,” says Adelaide, thinking not only of the old vulture who fired Teresa, but of mean Camille — twenty years in The Coke Ovens and she’s never said hello to a soul. Then there’s the New Waterford branch. Too bad Ginger has to be mixed up with any of them.
“Lord have mercy on them,” says Teresa, folding her hands around her cup.
“Mercy my foot,” says Adelaide, “here, baby.” Adelaide sets a plate of Nellie’s Muffins in front of Ginger. He gives her a kiss, sits down and hands the jammiest one to Hector, who grins with delight.
Adelaide cooks all that good plain Nova Scotia stuff. She comes from a community in Halifax called Africville. She is proud of her African Irish United Empire Loyalist blood, proud to have been baptized in Bedford Basin, and never tires of telling tales of the 1917 explosion — I was spared for a reason: to punch you in the nose, buddy — to dance with you tonight, honey — to see my babies grow.