In all this confusion, in all this disappointment and crying and embarrassment, Dots and Bernice and Estelle remained sitting on the large, new, unpaid-for couch, crying. Agatha had wished them goodnight with the kisses of her tears.
3
GATHERED INTO THE LING
Boysie had the habit of putting his feet on the desk in the main office. This belonged to Mr. Macintosh. He was the president of Macintosh and Company, Stock Brokers since 1867. Dreams and ambitions would flood Boysie’s head, and they would prevent him from finishing his work in the hour he had given himself as the time limit for this job. Cleaning the twenty offices in this company was his main contract. He had five other cleaning contracts in other parts of the city. But he liked doing Mr. Macintosh’s offices first, when he was fresh. He liked Mr. Macintosh. Mr. Macintosh had met him late one night in the offices, when he was finishing some brokerage business, and he had talked to Boysie about hard work, savings, investments and making a killing on the stock market. Boysie liked him. He liked Boysie. And from that first meeting, and after several others, Boysie decided to make his life as close as possible an imitation of Mr. Macintosh’s, for Mr. Macintosh was successful. Boysie started to smoke a pipe because Mr. Macintosh smoked a pipe. He even bought the same tobacco from a cigar store on King Street West. But soon he found he couldn’t afford such expensive habits. And knowing he hadn’t as much money as his idol, he used his head, and started to buy his tobacco supplies from a discount store on Bloor Street, near the subway entrance. He wore the same clothes as Mr. Macintosh — not while he was cleaning out his offices, of course — at least his suits were similar in appearance. He could not match the expensive material and expensive cuts Mr. Macintosh had, since he could not afford to have them tailored by Beauchamp & How Ltd. (Free Parking 2 Doors W of Store 94 King W — 364-4161; he had seen the label in one of Mr. Macintosh’s jackets which was left on the rack in his office, and he had looked up the address in the telephone directory), Boysie therefore did the next best thing his pockets could afford. He got his clothes custommade at Tip Top Tailors. He had planned, when he did this, to get his hands on some old labels from Beauchamp & How Ltd. Free Parking 2 Doors W of Store 94 King W — 364-4161, but that chance had not yet arrived.
Dreams and ambitions would fill Boysie’s head on those lonely hard-working fluorescent bright vacuum-humming nights, high in the sky overlooking Toronto, as he would pause to look into other buildings scrubbed and cleaned by European men-cleaners with heavy accents and their women with heavy ankles and blue veins and thick stockings. Once he thought he saw his apartment building from this height. The offices he cleaned had so much money in them, symbolized by the ticker-tape crawling like endless worms out of the wastepaper baskets; so much money represented on ledgers and cheques and notepaper torn up and thrown into the garbage with gobs of tense chewing gum smothered onto them! And Boysie would dream of making a million dollars. He had already started to read a lot of books to improve himself and to help him make some of this “easy-arse money the white people in Toronto have, man!” He read Time magazine and Life; and once he looked into the pages of the Atlantic, but he didn’t see anything in there to hold his errant interest long enough. So he closed it. These magazines he took from the brokerage offices and from other offices he cleaned at night. He tore off the addresses on them and put them, in full view of Bernice and Estelle and other West Indian friends, on his coffee table in his apartment, as if they were his private subscriptions. He also took home, a month late, copies of Marketing, The Financial Post, The Economist and the Stock Broker. He glanced into these, but like the Atlantic, they did not hold his interest long enough for him to learn their value so far as money was concerned.
But his great chance came when, one night, on one of his contract-cleaning jobs, he came upon an old set of Knowledge-of-the-World books. Fifteen volumes in all. They were in the wastepaper basket. “How the hell could anybody in their right mind throw-away all this good knowledge?” But he didn’t wait for the answer. He cleaned them off, put them in the front seat of his station wagon, away from the vacuum cleaner and the soaps and the cleaning wax and the brooms and the mops, and finally arranged them to rest, unopened, undisturbed and decorative, in the built-in bookshelves in his living room, where previously Dots had put Bernice’s replicas of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police walking without horses and the imitation of Niagara Falls, with some artificial small forests of coniferous and deciduous trees. Dots packed Bernice’s symbols of military history and geography in a Javex box and put them, with the rest of Bernice’s belongings, in the basement locker. “Education, darling,” Dots bragged to Bernice, with the same sudden concern as Boysie for more education. “Education. That is
