Henry stared Vladdy in the eye, and added, “And I want the trousers to be without cuffs, the bottoms sixteen inches, and make the trousers legs more slimmer than they look now. Eh, Vladdy, man?” And he patted Vladdy on his back to make him feel better. Old Vladdy was looking steadily at him, over his rimless glasses. Henry wondered whether he was actually seeing him, or anything else. But he was a blasted good tailor! Henry knew that. Vladdy had served him excellently in the past. “Now, Vladdy, as you know, I is one man who always pays his debts, punctual. And I know you appreciate that. Now, I want you to make-up these three-pieces real good for me, and real fast. Now, another thing, Vladdy, old bean, as you also know, I is a man not working at the present moment, but that don’t matter, ’cause you are going to get every fucking penny you charge me for the alteration job. The only thing is that I want you to treat me real nice, this time.” And there the bargaining began.
“Forty!” Vladdy almost overshouted his enthusiasm.
“But Jesus Christ, Vladdy, man! I am not buying-out this bloody tailor shop!”
“Forty! I take off twenty even before I say forty.”
“Goddamn, Vladdy! Man, wait, you want to send me on welfare, or something? Thirty, Vladdy, and not one bloody red penny more! I give you a lotta good work …”
“Thirty-five!” Old Vladdy was looking at him through the pincers of his rimless eyes. “Business, she is not too good this time of year, my friend. You see, look, my friend. You see all these suits? I make them in February, March, May. Now, is October. The people who own them, they bring them, I don’t see them no more. I have suits. I don’t get the money. You see, my friend, business she is not too good.” Old Vladdy was the champion shrugger when it came to telling a hard-luck story. Henry could spend a whole afternoon watching Vladdy, just to catch him shrugging his overclothed, overstuffed, padded shoulders. Henry wondered whether Vladdy wore the suits which were left with a down payment of their alteration costs, and which their owners never remembered to claim. Perhaps this rich brown suit with the shrugging shoulders was a suit that was owned, once upon a down payment, by a customer of Vladdy’s. “So, you see, Mr. White, the business? What I need suits for? I am tailor, not dandy.”
“Look, Vladdy, man, I have always deal fair and square with you. You know that. And I sorry as hell to hear that you not making a million dollars a week in your business. But you can’t blame me for all these unclaimed suits hanging up in your shop, man.”
“Thirty-five. The rent, it is due today. I have to pay it. The Hydro …”
“I am going to tell you something, Vladdy! Look, I got here with me …” And Henry made a big dramatic production of reaching into his leather wallet and fingering the bills (“Gimme the thirty in ones, please,” he had told the clerk at McTamney’s Pawnbrokers). Vladdy saw money and he saw blood. The first cash he had seen for the day; and he looked harder over his rimless glasses. Henry knew. “Look, ten dollars!”
And he dropped the ten one-dollar bills on the scissors-scarred counter, and they seemed to make a great noise in Vladdy’s invisible eyesight, so much so that Vladdy said, “All right, my friend. All right. Fifteen! And you leave my establishment this minute!” Something like a smile broke through the thickness of the rimless lenses.
“Fifteen, godblindyuh, Vladds, my friend!” And he almost jumped over the counter to embrace Vladdy. The next five one-dollar bills fell like a harvest of rain on the counter. “Now, Vladdy, boy. I want these suits real fast. And because you doing them in special speed, I still want a first-rate job, eh, Vladdy?”
“You come next week. You get suits.”
“In three days?”
“I am first class tailor, Mr. …”
“Okay, okay! Don’t get angry, Vladdy old bean!”
Henry walked the rest of the way home, to Agatha and love and the happiness of the Jewish-Polish meal. He had fourteen dollars left.
“Thanks,” he told her, repaying her the five dollars. When she saw the five dollars, in bills, she wondered. But Henry was too happy now, too excited for her to express what she was really wondering. And if Henry had told her that he was smiling because he had nine dollars left, in his wallet, that he could now join the crap game already in progress in the East End; if he had disclosed this to her, she would not have objected to his going, because she was so happy. “I love you,” he told her.
“I love you,” she said. She really loved him.
“I am the best man in the world, baby. So, you better be cool.”
“I don’t know ’bout the world, but you sure as hell are in bed!”
“A Barbadian man is the best man in the goddamn world! Ask any Barbadian.”
“Now that you’re in such a good mood, I may as well tell you that I have a seminar tonight at eight. And after that, I have to go visit mother … if you don’t mind. She’s not well …”
“Fine, fine, fine!”
Agatha continued to wonder. But she dared not ask him what he was wondering.
“Fine!”
Huron Street is beautiful in the autumn. The houses have just come through the scathing summer heat; the ivy on the walls of some houses changes its colour gradually, and if you had not walked along this street for three months before, you would not recognize it now. The street is marvellous from Bloor Street going north, but it ceases to be marvellous after you pass Bernard Avenue. After Lowther Avenue there is the noise of young ethnic children screaming from the Huron Street Public School, Junior. Estelle could see all this in her walk along the street, reading house numbers and front windows for
