She sat back and surveyed her handiwork. That should fix that stuck-up Russian.
After a few minutes she heard the front door open and the creak of the stairs leading to the upper floors. It was almost seven. That would be Paul Laramée coming home from his job with the city parks department. She gazed up at the cuckoo clock above the table, waiting for the bright-painted little bird to spring through the door and make its double-voiced iteration to the movement of the earth in relation to the sun. Though she was expecting it, the sudden appearance of the bird and its noise startled her momentarily, as it always did.
She had brought the clock with her to Canada in 1929, and through the depression and the years of her subsequent unhappy marriage to Clarence Hill she had cherished it as a tie with her family and childhood in Bad Kissingen. In 1942 she had run away from Clarence, a Montreal tool-and-die maker, and had come to this city where she had lived ever since.
There had been rumours in the neighbourhood that a syndicate was going to buy all the houses in the block on the west side of Adford, from Berther to Lownard Avenues, and replace them with a high-rise apartment project. Her house, number 120, was spang in the middle of the block, and she had already made up her mind to sell. With the money she would take a trip to Germany to see her aging mother, then return and open a nature farm.
There was a heavy authoritative knock on the door leading to the downstairs hall, and she recognized it as Gordon Lightfoot’s. She pushed herself to her feet, feeling a twinge of the lumbago that had been bothering her for several months. She mustn’t forget to get herself another bottle of pills on her way home tonight.
She opened the door and faced Gordon, her longest current tenant and certainly the most drunken of any roomer in the neighbourhood. Gordon was fully dressed, a condition that had become a rarity over the past two weeks. His sparse grey hair was carefully combed, his shoes shined, and his expensive suit cleaned and pressed.
“Guten Tag, Liebchen,” he said, raising a hand that held a bottle of Rhine wine. “I have brought you a drink from your native country. May I come in?”
She opened the door and he walked in with the exaggerated steadiness of the very drunk. Placing the bottle on the table he sat down in her usual chair, being very careful to hitch the press of his trousers over his knees.
“Haven’t you bought a corkscrew yet?” she asked him. She knew that his visit had not come about because he wanted to share his wine with her, but because he had no means of removing the cork. For a person whose alcoholic tastes were as constant and catholic as his were, the non-ownership of a corkscrew was a foolish oversight.
“You may not believe this, sweetheart,” he said, “but I have never owned a corkscrew.”
Though his flushed face was in repose and he seemed in a good humour, she had learned to be wary of his quick drunken changes of mood. He had frightened her half to death one time when he had first moved into the house.
He had owed her two weeks’ rent, and she hadn’t been able to catch him out of his room for several days. He had insisted on doing his own housekeeping when he took the room, and she had not found any legitimate excuse to enter his room. However, one afternoon she had walked along the hall and knocked on his door. There was no answer, so she had repeated her knock again and again, growing angrier by the minute. Finally she had heard the bedspring grumble, his drunken fumblings for the catch on the door, and then the door was flung open and he faced her.
Except for his necktie and shoes he was fully dressed, his coat and trousers wrinkled and stained, his shirt collar unbelievably dirty and bent, and his lint-covered socks hanging over the ends of his toes, He stared at her angrily from a face that hadn’t been shaved in days, from beneath hair that stuck up in sweat-sticky disarray. His teeth were yellow from neglect and there were salty crusts around his eyes. A big vein on each of his temples was pounding, and his face was bloated and red except for yellow-white patches on both his cheeks.
“Mr. Lightfoot!” she had exclaimed in horror, stepping back from the open door.
“What do you want?” he asked, his voice catching as if forced through a windpipe too small to contain it.
“I wondered — I came to see if you were all right,” she said, trying to smile reassuringly but only managing a frightened grin.
“All I ask in this house is to be left alone,” he said, his voice a queer falsetto. “I don’t ask for anything else, do I?”
“No, Mr. Lightfoot.”
“Then why in hell are you knocking at my door!” he suddenly shouted, taking a step forward.
She backed herself against the stairs. Despite her fear and disgust she noticed his physical weakness as he stepped toward her, and her fear melted before her desire to dominate him and assert her authority.
“You owe me two weeks’ rent,” she said. “I want it and I want it right now!” Supported by her new bravery she stepped forward and peered through the doorway into the room. The bed was unmade, with most of the bedclothes trailing on the floor beneath the window. The dresser top had been swept clear of its normal bric-a-brac and now held several empty wine and whisky bottles and two half-filled vials of pills. There were other bottles lying on their sides on the floor, along with empty paper bags, cigarette packs, and a partly eaten sandwich, its crusts curling with age. His shoes were placed neatly beneath the wooden clothes closet, but his necktie lay twisted and vomit-stained beneath the dirty and discoloured washbowl. The room smelled of cheap wine, sweat, vomit, and decay. She fell back into the hall again.
“Well, what do you think of it?” Lightfoot asked her.
“It’s disgusting!” she shouted. “Dirty, filthy, and disgusting! Even a pig wouldn’t live in such a place!” Feeling braver by the minute she added, “You’re nothing but a dirty Trunkenbold!”
His face seemed to narrow and lose some of its colour as he pulled himself erect. “I’ve been sick drunk for a week, but all my dirt is out there where it can be seen. When I make dirt I clean it up by myself, understand! I didn’t ask you or anyone else to help me. In the meantime stay away from this door!” His voice dropped into its usual register again. “Please just leave me alone to get better, that’s all I ask.”
Grace wanted to escape from the sight and smell of him but felt impelled to have the last word.
“That geranium needs some water,” she said, pointing to the flower pot in the window.
The next day, grey and drawn but cleanly scrubbed and dressed, Lightfoot knocked at her door. Without a word he handed over two weeks’ rent and waited in the doorway while she made him out a receipt. Then he asked for a pail, broom, scrub brush, and laundry soap, and she handed them out to him without a word.
For most of the day she heard him scrubbing and moving furniture around in his room. That evening, slightly drunk again but with his colour back, he returned the cleaning things and a bundle of bedclothes, which she exchanged for clean ones. When she heard him leave the house, she opened his door with her key and gazed astounded at the room. The wash basin had been scoured to a high polish, the empty bottles and other garbage were gone, and the linoleum had been scrubbed along with the floor mat that lay neatly beside the bed. She hurried to the window and found that even the earth in the geranium pot was damp from watering.
One morning as she placed his mail under his door, he opened it and apologized for the mess he had made a few days before. He was quite sober, and he stayed that way for nearly three weeks. From then on she didn’t interfere with him, and he kept to himself when he was drinking. About six months after moving into the house he brought a bottle with him to her kitchen one day, and they sat and talked for an hour or so. She never succeeded in finding out where his money came from, though he didn’t have to work. Her early hatred for him changed to a grudging respect, and she never tested his temper