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 too much after the first time.
“Where are you going tonight, Grace?” Lightfoot asked as she poured a second drink of wine into his glass.
“To the Gardens,” she replied. “There’s a double main bout on the card and a tag match.”
He smiled at her across the table in the faintly supercilious way he had when she mentioned wrestling matches. His smile always angered her momentarily, but she recognized it as the mark of his superior intelligence, and afterwards she would picture it to herself and bask in its mocking scorn.
“A new roomer moved in today,” she said, sipping at her wine. “He’s got the back room on the second floor, Cartwright’s old room.”
“Yes, I heard you talking to him in the hallway. What is he, an unemployed chimney sweep — or another college kid with an inordinate urge to howl at the moon on the evenings of monthly remittance days?”
“He’s an editor,” she said triumphantly. “He told me he edits a magazine called Real Estate something or other.”
“Oh.” His enthusiasm disappeared as quickly as it had been aroused. Then as if remembering something, “Where’s that cat of yours?”
“She’s out. She stays out every night now that the weather is getting mild,” she said defensively.
“She’ll be having another litter of kittens again, I suppose,” he said. “You’ll be able to enjoy your vicarious pregnancy again this summer.” And as he turned towards the door with the wine bottle in his hand he said over his shoulder, “I thought you looked a trifle parturient when I came in.”
She went upstairs later and affixed the sign she had lettered beneath the chain-operated water tank on the bathroom wall. When she left the bathroom she walked along the second-floor hallway and switched on the fifteen-watt bulb that cast a feeble light from dusk to dawn. From upstairs she could hear Monique Laramée playing with her babies.
How could a woman tie herself down to children like that, she wondered. There was too much fear and worry in bringing up a family, and besides children could die or be killed by a car. Still, the Laramées seemed happy enough, and they paid their rent every week without fail. Of course they were French Canadians, and she knew plenty about them, having lived in Montreal. Bed, babies, and beer was all they thought of. Dirty devils mostly, but she had to admit that Monique kept the two attic rooms and her children scrupulously clean.
She knocked on the door of the front room and heard Sophia Karpluk shuffling towards her in her slippers.
“Hello, Sophy,” she said as the door was opened.
“Hello,” Sophia answered, gazing at her without enthusiasm.
“I smell something good,” Grace said. “Stew?”
“You might call it that,” the woman answered, motioning to a small curtained-off kitchenette at the rear of the big front room.
“How was the hospital today?”
“The same as always.” Sophia had a more tenacious accent than Grace, perhaps because she had only been in Canada for a few years.
Grace stared around the room. There were some small modernistic paintings on the walls, and the ancient davenport was covered with a piece of heavy material whose gold threads glittered in the light from a tri-lite lamp. A hanging bookshelf held some paperback novels, an English-Polish
