“Oh my God! so much trouble when you associate with a black man, a negro! So much trouble! and nobody will ever leave you alone to work out your own bloody problems!” The only person she felt she could commiserate with was Estelle, but she hadn’t seen Estelle for a long time.
She called Bernice to find out where Estelle was these days. She felt better when she thought of Estelle. But Bernice didn’t know where to find her. And Agatha, tormented beyond reason, beyond her strongest rationalizations about marrying a black man, found herself thrown deep into a pit of self-argument. One argument would tell her that such a letter was nothing more than a symptom, an example of the insane people living in this city, in this world — a gesture, but a clear explicit gesture, of bigotry, or sickness even. She liked to tell herself that all those people who stared at her when she walked beside her black, her loving black man, were not merely angry at her with their glances, they were sick. Sometimes she told herself it was their envy. During that time of trouble and of embarrassment and loss of money deposited on apartments, when she had to vacate those apartments when landlords found out she was being visited by a black man, she always insisted she was the only healthy person: everybody else was sick.
She was healthy in her body too, and would always try to make herself more beautiful for Henry. She was strongly built with a small face, and a mouth full of teeth, her own teeth, for which apparently small fact Henry was exuberantly grateful. Her ankles were strong, the ankles of someone who had walked many miles through the manure of fields, or through the slush of a spring day on a farm, long long ago in the history of her genes. She loved Henry, and something in her makeup, perhaps her arrogance, told her she could give him happiness. She was conscious of being suspected by Bernice and Dots, and by Boysie, but she still felt she could give Henry more happiness in his life than any other woman.
Now, the letter … for this letter to come and spoil all this beauty, all this happiness; for a letter from an unknown person to come and bring about such unhappiness, and such doubt!
Boysie was blowing the horn from a way down at the bottom of Baldwin Street. Some women looked out their windows, imagining the noise was the noise of an idiot, a crank; that a car horn was stuck; that a child perhaps, was stuck between the steering wheel and the seat or some other part of a parked car; but when they saw who it was driving the car and making all this noise, they slammed their windows down; blammed their front doors and went back inside their gloomy parlours.
Boysie was driving his new station wagon. It was not really a new model. But it was a model new to him. He had Dots in the front seat with him. The pride of possession on Dots’s face was as loud as the noise of the horn, if her pride and her expression could talk or could scream. Already she was a new woman, a free woman; a woman with her own apartment, her own key; she could take the elevator and go up up up to the seventh floor now; she could open her front door any hour she liked; her dark blue Princess telephone with the light, to illuminate the darkness of the numbers of the dial when the lights in the living room weren’t on, and when the bedroom was darkened just prior to nightly sex with her rejuvenated husband … she was free and new in these ways. All these things she could do now; all these things she couldn’t do in the living-in quarters in Mrs. Hunter’s home on Binscarth Road in Rosedale, just a spit’s throw from where she was now living on Ontario Street. Dots was free. It had been a day of rejoicing. Boysie was sitting behind the steering wheel!
Dots is the first to get out of the station wagon. She bends down, and inspects her face in the shining side of the car. There is a spot there. She looks at her face in the mirror of the door and she wets a Kleenex tissue with her saliva, and she wipes the spot off. Nobody could have seen that spot with a naked eye. All this time, Boysie is blowing the horn. His hat is pushed back on his head. His forehead is shining like the car. A cigarette is in his mouth, and he carries it just like those well-tanned men at the races who have won heavily on a horse that is a “long shot.” One hand is relaxed through the window; the other is running along the top of the seat, and his legs are on the seat. He is smiling. Dots gets back into the station wagon; but she has left the door open. More people come to their windows, look out, see who the madre it is out there, close their windows with a bang,
