“Now, what can I do for you?” the Head Nurse asked Bernice.
“My sister. She’s getting discharge and I come for her.”
“What’s her name?”
“Leach … no, Shepherd. Estelle Shepherd.”
“Don’t you know her name! Make up your mind! We don’t have anybody here named Shepherd.”
“How you mean?”
“I just told you! We do not have anybody here by that name!” She was moving away back to the office. When she got close to Dots, who was not in her way, she said, “If you don’t mind!” in perfect, overcivilized, cold politeness. She rustled some papers hanging on a clip against a clipboard. She found what she was looking for (even her appearance gave you the impression of her diligence and efficiency), and she went back to Bernice. Victory, unconditional defeat (for Bernice) was marked all over her lipstick. She said, “Your sister was discharged this morning. She left this morning. The nurse who was on duty then wrote out her discharge.”
Bernice was thrown back upon the fat of her own mental resources to solve this problem. It was as if she was having to pay for something, some act she had done long ago in her past, and which had now accumulated into a large vengeance. Before she began to search over the pages of her life — beginning from her village days of youth and freedom within the poverty of sunshine and sea — she had argued with Dots about calling the police to search for Estelle. She imagined Estelle raped again, this time by a cruel man who afterwards killed her. She saw Estelle in the Toronto morgue on Gould Street, in the garbage-can section of the city. She saw Estelle dead in some back alley, like Sackville Street or Toronto Street, dragged there, probably, by some desire of hers which she could not wait to satisfy … she saw Estelle in her mind, dead.
But Dots was the more patient; the more intelligent. “Wait a day or two. Nothing don’t happen in this city that the police don’t know about at least a day after. I wouldn’t call the police, if I was you. Wait. Have patience.”
And Bernice decided to take Dots’s advice; but this did not prevent her from worrying. Again, she had had to lose her temper (with the Head Nurse) to gain her respect. If she hadn’t talked up to that Head Nurse; if Dots hadn’t intervened in her behalf, she would have had to wait the fifteen minutes; and that would have meant fifteen minutes less with which to face this problem.
“What I do? What have I done? What the hell have I done in my life that I am getting all this bad luck, all the time? First thing, it is Estelle — mixing-up with that man! Then, the pregnancy! The hospital. The ambulance. And be-Christ, now this! What have I done in my past, Dots, that now I am reaping all these bad times?” Dots could find no piece of evidence in the history of her life to console her with. If she had, she would not have told her anyhow, for that would have worsened the situation. “All this bad luck, Dots! Who know where it is going to end? My job. My job is all I got left; and I can’t afford to lose that. With a job, it is shit living in this man’s place. And without a job, well …”
She had called Henry by this time. She had called Brigitte. She had called Boysie. She had called Agatha. She had eaten her pride and had called Priscilla. And surprisingly, Priscilla was very courteous. She was courteous in order to eke out all the details of Estelle’s situation, so that the moment Bernice put down the telephone, she took it up again, and called Carmeeta Anne Bushell, the other West Indian woman who had attended the welcoming party for Estelle many months ago, and who was a university student.
Dots was impatient to leave. Bernice was so insecure that she felt Dots wanted to leave so she could telephone Brigitte, and tell her, and laugh about it. “Don’t leave yet. Stay with me, eh?” she pleaded; and Dots satisfied her with an hour more. And when the hour was up, her anxiety to leave once more suggested to Bernice her eagerness to spread the scandal even further.
Bernice was alone: thrown back upon her resources which, at the beginning of this situation, were not too strong anyway. But she made up her mind not to break under its pressure. “I can’t give up now; I can’t crumple under this, no no no.” But the strength had to come from outside. There had to be someone who she could trust. She enumerated those persons she knew as “friends”; and she found no one suitably trustworthy. Dots was already saturated by her problems; and Bernice did not want to harness her with more anxiety. Apart from counting her “friends,” Bernice made a tally of the people she hated: Mrs. Burrmann (for overworking her, and making her “slave for peanuts” so many months); Mr. Burrmann (because he was white: she could find no other reason than that; and although she hated him for the brutal way he treated his wife, and more recently, her own sister, she could not make up her mind whether to hate him more than she hated his wife. She did not care enough for her own sister or for Mrs. Burrmann to avenge their mistreatment at his hands); Brigitte (because she had betrayed her: she had exposed everything about the attempted abortion, which she herself had induced; and also because it was through her that Henry had been beaten up by the police); Boysie (because he was Boysie); and Henry (because after he had tried to seduce her and
