Bernice made a greater noise with the plates and the cups in the sink than necessary, to let it be known that she was there. She wanted him to know she was working; she was busy; she wasn’t sitting down on her backside waiting on him. But most of all, she wanted him to know that she both acknowledged his presence and ignored it. It was a trick she had learned from Mammy who always told her that in the face of danger, pretend you are busy with the job you had been doing before the danger arose. That way, Mammy said, a man would have to be worse than Satan to think of troubling you. And it seemed to work now, assuming that that was Mr. Burrmann’s intention. He went straight upstairs to his bedroom. She made less noise with the washing now that the danger was out of sight, above, walking on leather heels on the bedroom floor. But she was still frightened. She thought of calling Dots to tell her that Mr. Burrmann was home. She had seen a movie once (she couldn’t remember its name), in which a man was planning to murder his wife; and she shuddered now as she had shuddered then, in spite of the safety of the knowledge that it was merely a film, and far from her, on the screen: when the man moved about in an attic room, and how the gaslight went down every time he went up there, searching for whatever he was searching for. She never knew whether or not the man killed his wife. And that made her more frightened now. She went outside that night before the end of the film, and she refused to take a taxicab home (it was almost midnight) from Yonge Street, near the bright lights and the book shops that sold sex magazines every minute of the revolving sun and moon. She stood in the chilly night with a waiting crowd for the subway, and then meandered home to Marina Boulevard by the bus which hitched up with the last subway train.
The feet are moving now. She looks up to see if she can follow the noise with her eyes. She imagines he is searching for something, just as the man in the film was searching for something. She looks up at the electric lights, the electric bulb in the kitchen, to see whether the light is dying. But it is daytime now. And the lights are not burning. She went to the telephone to call Dots. Something was funny. Something was happening upstairs. Strange, strange that he would come home, in the middle of the morning (it was ten o’clock), when he was supposed to be up north fishing. Be-Christ, Mister Burrmann, you aren’t going to kill me, eh! Not me! She had been watching too much television, which was her only companion in the long nights — when Dots did not come over.
“He here!”
“Who?” Dots asked, slightly peeved, because she had talked to Bernice only an hour ago, and they had agreed to meet at the Rosedale subway station at two o’clock to go to the hospital for Estelle. It was the day she was being discharged. “You sound frightened.”
“He! Mister Burrmann! Here!”
“I thought he was up north hunting.”
“He back! And no sooner than that brute come through the front door, than he made it straight upstairs, and now he up there walking and walking all over the bedroom, over my head like in that movie I told you about. I frightened for him, Dots.”
“You is a coward?”
“I ain’t no coward, man,” Bernice said, trying to control her voice, and put more sureness into it. “You remember that movie I went to see one night at the Odeon? With that man who had make up his mind to kill-off his wife for the jewels her mother left back for her in her will? And how the gaslight went down every time he start his prowling? And how she used to sit alone, poor soul, by herself in the house, night after night, midnight turn into dawn, and that bastard her husband never did spend one hour with that poor girl …”
“Look, control your blasted self, woman! You dreaming, or what?”
“Myself controlled. I am not a child, Dots. But living in this big house by myself now has me scared as hell. You ever stayed in a house this big, twenty-one rooms, by yourself? and when the nights come you start hearing all kinds o’ noise, people walking when you know there ain’t one bloody soul in this house save you! the house creaking, doors closing …”
“It’s the foundation shifting. That’s all. It does happen in the best and newest homes. Down here in Rosedale, it is haunted as hell, too! These white people’s houses all haunted as hell! if you ask me. It’s your goddamn ’magination. So hurry up and get dressed. Rosedale station. I’m going to be
