A Sharp Intake of Breath. Джон Миллер

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СКАЧАТЬ then because to do so would have been to relay information that would have blown her cover as the perfect daughter. Even though Lil probably would’ve gotten in much more trouble, and she could’ve had the pleasure of taking Lil down with her, Bessie resisted the temptation. I didn’t fully understand, until then, how much my parents’ approval meant to her.

      Until they discovered my special gift, Ma had delegated the keeping of the inventory solely to Bessie, who had shown some promise in arithmetic at school. It was the only subject she excelled in, and our parents wanted to encourage her. I used to follow Bessie around when she did her duties, looking at the lists she made and noting the monthly changes, how she reconciled them with the sales records. It was hard to account for a few yards of cloth—the fabric our parents sold was kept on large bolts and sold by the foot or the yard, so to be precise in the inventory would have meant unravelling and measuring, and who had the time or space for that? Another method was weighing the bolts, but we didn’t have a scale. Consequently, we counted the layers at the top of a bolt and estimated roughly that two layers was one yard. In addition, Ma asked Bessie to make a list of the number of ends—the bolts with fewer than four yards on them—and to note which colour and type of material they were.

      One day, I saw Bessie checking and re-checking the list, wearing her eraser to the nub, and going back into the storefront three times to start over.

      “What’s wrong?” I kept asking, following behind as she ignored me and became more frantic.

      “Ma’s gonna kill me,” she eventually muttered, walking and counting with her fingers. “I think I messed up the ends count—again. There are fifteen fewer this month, but I can only account for fourteen when I look at the sales record. I think I might’ve counted wrong again. This is the third month it’s happened. I thought there were twenty-four last month, but maybe there were only twenty-three. Promise you won’t tell Ma; she’ll have my head.”

      “I promise,” I said. Then, after a minute or two, “You didn’t count wrong, you know. There were twenty-four last month. You wanna know which colours?”

      “Don’t bother me right now, Toshy. This is important.”

      “I’m telling you, I know the colours.”

      She stared at me and folded her arms. “You remember the colours. Sure. I’d have to look at my notebook to know that.”

      “I just remember. I’ll show you.” I proceeded to walk the perimeter of the store, pointing out the precise locations where those fifteen bolts had been and also naming their colours, including the missing one, and ignoring this month’s new ends. Bessie followed me and checked off the ones I called out against her list. “And the missing one was a kind of blue.”

      “How did you do that?” She scrutinized me like you would a magician if you were trying to see where up his sleeve he’d hidden the rabbit.

      “I just remember things when I see them.”

      “What kind of things?”

      “All kinds of things...” I searched for an example. “Oh! Like the Tarzan comic!”

      “Well, that’s not too hard. It has four panels at most, and you just read it an hour ago.”

      “No. I mean I remember the words from every one of them. Every day.” I was crazy about Tarzan. I loved how strong he could be without ever speaking a word. I loved that people didn’t mock him for being like the animals. They thought he was mysterious. I would’ve cut out the comic strip if Ma hadn’t wanted the paper intact, in case she needed to wrap things. It didn’t matter; I could retrieve the images any time I wanted.

      “Prove it.”

      “Okay.” I closed my eyes and chose a day from December, the last day of school before the holidays. An image flashed in my mind, and I started reciting the words in the dialogue bubbles. I made the sound effects too, waved my arms like the gorillas, and jumped up on the tables in the store to act it all out. Bessie laughed. I retrieved the next image, and so on. I played all the parts, Tarzan, Jane, the animals, and stray hunters and villains that entered the storyline, until Bessie said, “Okay, stop it! I believe you. Holy smokes, that’s really weird.”

      “It is?” Great, I thought, just great. Another weird thing about me. That was exactly what I needed.

      “In any case, this doesn’t help me figure out what happened to those extra bolts.”

      “Did you count the ones Lil takes into the backyard?”

      “Excuse me?”

      “Sometimes I see her taking an end and giving it to a man she meets in the backyard.”

      Bessie’s eyebrows lifted. “No. No, I did not count those ones. Thanks, Toshy.” She patted me on the head. I was proud that I’d solved the mystery. “I think I’m going to have to have a little chat with our sister when she comes home.” There was a sharpness to Bessie’s voice. Later, I overheard my sisters arguing in their bedroom. With an ear pressed to the door, I couldn’t make out everything, but I did catch the crucial bits.

      Bessie said, “I don’t care who needs clothes, Lil. You can’t save the whole world, especially not by stealing from Ma and Pop!” Then Lil said, “They wouldn’t even notice,” and Bessie said, “I noticed.” Then Lil: “I promise I won’t do it again, but if you tell Ma and Pop, I’ll tell them you’ve already been to second base.” There was a silence, then Bessie hissed, “I trusted you!” After that, all I heard was angry mumbling.

      Bessie didn’t tell. At first, I thought she sympathized with Lil’s generosity, but then I thought no, she just didn’t want to explain to Ma why she’d gone three months without telling her she’d screwed up the count. It had to be that, because why would our parents care if she played baseball?

      The next month, everything checked out perfectly.

      As I BEGAN TO EXPLAIN, telling my family that I remembered Nurse Grace’s stories about the Orange Sunset had one consequence worth noting: it convinced my parents it might not be a complete waste of time to bring me on the planned outing that evening. Emma Goldman was in Toronto on tour, and everyone was going to hear her. Emma Goldman, the most dangerous woman in the world! By then, people already called her that, and I was curious to see what could be so scary. I didn’t know or even care that she never preached violence, that people who called her dangerous didn’t know a damn thing about her.

      Normally, Emma lectured on controversial progressive subjects such as free love, by which she didn’t mean promiscuity—though she wasn’t opposed to that—but rather the freedom to love whomever you wished. In those days, when marriages were arranged contracts trapping either loveless couples or people for whom love had blossomed but then wilted, it was a radical notion to choose and change partners at will, just to follow the heart. In the early 1900s, she was also speaking out in favour of birth control, sexual and personal emancipation for women, and even, Ari has recently told me, homosexual rights.

      In Toronto’s Jewish community, to go to hear her speak you didn’t need to be an anarchist sympathizer. She was a Jew and an infamous international celebrity. Besides, that night, her lecture topic was to be the playwright Henrik Ibsen and the modern drama, and what harm could there be in that? My parents packed us into the streetcar on that cold night in 1926 and took us to Hygeia Hall. We took seats near the back of the auditorium, near the police who were lined up and scribbling things in their notebooks.

      Although СКАЧАТЬ