The seriousness of his agreement to marry Agatha had just hit him for the first time. It wasn’t his idea to get married. If he had his way, he would have continued to live in the pleasurable sin of common-law happiness; he would never get married: there were too many willing women around in Toronto, he always told Boysie, who at one time in the ecstasy of his infatuation for Brigitte had threatened to beat up Dots and then leave her for Brigitte. “Behave yourself, boy,” Henry had advised him, then. “Look, never exchange a wife for a outside-woman, be-Christ, you don’t even know where she come from. You don’t even know if she bathes only once a week, you don’t know if she is dirty, you don’t know if she’s married already in Germany, you don’t know if she have another man with you, you don’t know if she have syphilis or some other disease. You don’t know nothing ’bout that woman. And you come telling me you’re leaving Dots, a woman you know like the back o’ your blasted hand for a woman …”
“But I love her, man, Henry,” Boysie pleaded. “I love her bad bad.”
“Love? Love my arse! I tired telling you there ain’ nothing called love!”
And now, it was Henry’s turn to love, to be in love. He knew he was in love with Agatha, in spite of his constant denials; in spite of his front of hardness, of toughness, of callousness, he had always loved her, and he had always put up these fronts in the presence of Boysie.
“Well, I have you now for myself, you brute,” Agatha said, jokingly. “Mrs. Henry White! Jesus God, what a name for me to have! Ha-ha!” She was laughing — as she always did — at her new surname: the way it would fit her, and the way she first looked at him that night in a room somewhere on Bedford Road, when he told her his name was White. “White?” she had asked him; and then she burst out laughing. “Whoever gave you a name like that?”
“What’s so goddamn funny ’bout the name, White?”
“Nothing, nothing at all.”
“What’s so goddamn funny ’bout being called Mrs. White?” he asked her.
“I like it. I love it.”
And they embraced some more, and kissed some more, and Henry wanted to go further; but Agatha said she was not in the mood. “Let’s wait. I’m best after a party, remember? We have to dress to go up to Bernice’s apartment.” Never during the time she had known Bernice had Agatha ever referred to Bernice’s place as her quarters. Henry always noticed this respect which she had for Bernice, and he marvelled at it. It was the more significant because the two women, Bernice and Dots, had never come to accept Agatha completely. She was always the “white woman,” or “Henry’s white woman”; she was never referred to as Henry’s woman, or as the woman.
“Where do you think we should live?”
“Live?” Henry was still looking for a job. He had given his consent “to be married to Agatha,” without having first considered the probability that he might never again get a job. He was getting old. And Agatha was such a type of woman that she would want him (and he knew this) to have a job that she could tell her friends about, and she would want her friends to be impressed by it. He could hear her talking to them on the telephone, or during some coffee party, or at some other party, “My husband works here … and he does this, or that.” Henry knew there would be a great strain on him trying to measure up to Agatha’s intellectual level, and up to her social level. But he had decided from the start, when the talk had become serious, and marriage had been skirted as the best thing for them to do (“I am tired living in sin with you, Henry White. We have to get married. Or end it. Lots of people, lots of coloured men, some of them still students, marry white girls”), that he was going to get himself a good unskilled job that brought in about one hundred dollars a week, or one hundred and ten, or twenty or thirty (with overtime). He was going to kill himself with overtime to bring his wages up to a respectable level, and if that bitch as much as open her goddamn mouth telling me I should be this or I should be that, goddammit, gorblummuh! as Boysie would say, I am going to pour some stiff lashes in her backside as I would pour peas in a pot.
“Why can’t we rent a nice cheap apartment somewhere down here, where you would be near the university, and we could save some money for the first five years, and …”
“Five years? Five years? In five years I would be an old woman, Henry White! What would I be doing spending five years to save enough to move out of this slum?”
“It is not a slum, goddammit!” He had raised his voice at her. It was too soon for the landlady to hear them carrying on like this. “This is a nice neighbourhood. It’s near to everything. It’s the Spadina area, remember?” He meant that as a Jew, she should appreciate that lots of her own people had begun right here on this street. “Spadina. Anyway, I have to get my hands on a job first, before we could move out of this place. I don’t want you supporting me, lady. In a few months you would be telling me how to live my goddamn life.”
“But darling, if you don’t have money, and I have it, and I am your wife …” This was a very sore point with him. Over the months of their topsy-turvy relationship, she had lent him money often: they had got drunk together on her money; she had bought Christmas presents for
