The Luck Of Ginger Coffey Read online

  Coffey reached for his fourth glass of beer. Might as well. She didn't bloody well love him any more so what did it matter if he got drunk. Today was enough to drive any man to drink.

  "Tonight, Coffey, you will become a proofreader. You will read all the news. War in China, peace in our time. Mere finger exercises. Later, Coffey, if you show promise, we may let you read something more important. The Quebec Society News, for instance. Or the Governor-General's speech to the Crippled Deaf Mute Division of the

  United Sons of Scotland. And if you continue to show promise — if you make no mistake, allow no errors typographic or orthographic to slip into print, then we may even let you read an advertisement. And some day, you may become a senior man, a man who reads only advertisements. Because, Coffey, news is cheap. Here today and gone tomorrow. But advertisements cost money. They count. So you must get them right, do you hear? Compree?"

  "Compree," Coffey said, raising his hand to signal the waiter.

  The old man nodded and smiled. "It's money that counts, all right," he said. "Ten men run this country, did you know that? Ten big finenceers. And did you know there's a book tells you who they are and how they made it? You'll want to read that book, being a New Canadian. Yes, you will. You can borrow my copy, if you like."

  Yes, CofFey said, he must dip into that sometime. He paid for another round of beers.

  "Are you just pu-passing through?" Harry asked him. "Or du-do you pu-plan to stay for a while?"

  Coffey took a long pull of his beer. "Passing through," he said. "Matter of fact, I'm just in the proofroom so's I can pick up the Tribune style. MacGregor's going to make me a reporter."

  As he said this, he saw Fox screw up his left eye in a large drunken wink. Harry collapsed in a fresh rush of laughter. The old man shook his head. "Big finenceers," he mumbled. "Scab labor, that's what we are."

  "But — but what's the matter?" Coffey asked. "I mean, what's funny about it?"

  Again Fox winked at the others. "Nothing funny," he said. "I just hope you succeed, that's all."

  Coffey stared at their knowing faces. What did they

  mean? Had he been tricked? "Look, fellows," he said. "Tell me. I want to know. Do you think he will make me a reporter?"

  "Stranger things have happened," Fox said. "Drink

  «p;

  "Big finenceers," the old man mumbled. "I remember one time —"

  But Coffey no longer listened. He sat dumb, drowsy with beer, the glasses multiplying in front of him, the stylebook forgotten in his pocket. Were they making a joke of him? Was MacGregor tricking him? What was going on? Was it for this he had traveled across half a frozen continent and the whole Atlantic Ocean? To finish up as a galley slave among the lame, the odd, the halt, the old?

  "Money," Fox was saying. "Oh, let me tell you, you can be a four-letter bastard all your life but never mind. If you die with enough money in the bank, the Tribune will write you a fine editorial eulogy —"

  Had he been wrong to bet his all on Canada? Would he have been better to stick in those dead-end jobs at home, plodding along, day in and day out, until he dropped? Canada — listen to these fellows — they seem to think Canada is the back of beyond. . . .

  "Nu-nother depression," Harry said. "You just wu-watch it. They sneeze in the States and we get pneumonia here."

  Was that true? Was it a backwater, like the land he had fled? Had he made the mistake of his life, landing himself up here among these people, either smug like old Gerry, or full of gloomy prophecies like these fellows? Bloody Canada! Bloody Canadians!

  "Just a poor clutch of Arctic-bound sods—" Fox was saying.

  For if Veronica was going to leave him, then hadn't this been the greatest mistake ever?

  "Greatest mistake this country ever made was not joining the United States," Fox said.

  There was always Paulie. IVe got a job, Pet, he'd told her. Yes, Daddy. Daddies are supposed to get jobs. Not very great to have a job, is it? Not this job. Yes, if he lost Veronica, he would lose Paulie too. And would have no one.

  "Drink up," Fox said. "Last call, boys."

  "Must phone," he said, standing up. "Just a moment."

  Because, ah, Vcra didn't mean it, did she? She was just upset, she would say she was sorry now. Never mind, dear, he'd say. My fault. I love you, Kitten. I love you too, Ginger. Yes . . . she'd be over it now. . . .

  He dialed. "Vera?"

  "It's me. Paulie."

  "Oh, Paulie," Coffey said, closing his eyes, leaning his forehead against the cool glass of the booth. "Is your mother there, Pet?"

  "I told you she went out."

  "Out?"

  "Daddy, are you drinking?"

  "No, no, that's a way to speak to your Daddy! Listen, Apple. Give her a message. Tell her to phone me. All right?"

  "Where?"

  "The Tribune. It's a newspaper. All right?"

  "Okay. I'll leave a note for her," Paulie said.

  "Listen —Paulie?"

  "What is it?" Paulie asked crossly.

  "Paulie . . . You don't think I'm selfish, do you? I me an — listen, Apple. You're still my own little Apple, hmm?"

  "Oh, stdp it, Daddy!"

  "Not cross at me ... I mean . . . listen, Pet. I mean, Paulie . . . Daddy's not bad, is he? MmmP . . . Paulie?"

  Dizzy, all that beer in a hurry, but the pane of glass was so cool against his forehead . . .

  "Listen, Pet . . . won't be home. Want to speak to Mummy . . . tell her . . . Apple . . . Tell her, Daddy's sorry —"

  Fox banged on the door of the booth. "Saddle up," he shouted. "Come on, galley slave. Hitler's Legion rides again."

  "Paulie —Paulie?"

  Brr-brr-brr-brr the phone went. He shoveled the receiver back on to its cradle, and looked at it dully. No, Paulie didn't care. . . .

  He stepped out of the booth and stumbled. "I'm drunk/' he said. "I'm ploothered."

  "Never mind," Fox said. "So are we all, all honorable men. Take his arm there. Hurry! Hurry!"

  Into the men's washroom behind the composing room, Old Billy Davis led Coffey, fumbling drunk. Stood him beside the basins, took hold of Coffey's jaws, forcing them open as though he would administer a pill, but instead darted his finger into Coffey's mouth, pulled it out again and forced Coffey's head down towards the washbasin. Then waited, placid and fragile in his fawn windbreaker, as his victim, hands gripping the basin, retched wildly, flooding the bowl.

  "Once more?"

  "No . . . no," Coffey moaned, coughing until the tears came.

  "Better now? All right. Follow me."

  Out of the men's locker room in a trembling run, past the compositors' lockers, through the lanes of linotype

  machines to the row of steel desks . . . Hands reached past, claiming galleys, shuffling copy, spiking galleys; busy, everyone busy, no voices heard above the chattering mumble of machines. Drained, but still ill, Coffey made a cradle of his arms and rested his head on the dirty steel desk top. J. F. Coffey, Editor; J. F. Coffey, Journalist. In a weak moment he felt the tears come: she did not love him; she hated him and why shouldn't she, rotten with drink, he was, great drunken lump, J. F. Coffey, Journalist, plooth-ered his first night on the job. Ah God! He hated this great lump, blowing into his thick red mustache, self-pitying fool. . . .

  "Hey, hey," Fox said, shaking him. "Wake up, Paddy. Hitler's coming. Here you are."

  A half-finished galley appeared in front of Coffey's face. And just in time.

  Mr. MacGregor was coming through. Bony old arms hanging naked from shirt sleeves, blue vein pumping in his pale forehead, fanatic eye starved for trouble. As he swept out on his nightly visitation, office boys, delinquent deskmen, guilty reporters, all avoided his eye, practiced the immobility of small animals as a hawk moves over a forest. But on the instant MacGregor entered the composing room, some of the ferocity drained from his walk. Here, old battles had been fought, old forts abandoned. Here, the enemy was in full command, camped permanently within MacGregor'
s walls. Strikes, scabs, shutouts; all had failed. Hedged around by clause and contract, the Managing Editor was forbidden to lay a finger on one stick of type, denied the right to speak one word of direct command. The composing room foreman waited his nightly sortie with the amused contempt of a Roman general dealing with the chieftain of a small hill tribe. Here, each night, MacGregor relived his defeat.

  And so, as was his custom, his impotence sought its

  revenge. Alone in that union camp, the proofreaders were still his servants.

  "Who let this pass?" he shouted, shaking a galley high above the dirty steel desks. "Who let this pass?"

  Fox raised his gray stubbled chin, took the galley, consulted the penciled initials. "Day man/' he said.

  "Jesuschrist! Got this name wrong, see? Friend of the publisher. Jesuschrist!"

  Fox looked at the ceiling as though engaged in mental arithmetic. His fellow workers read proof with awful intensity.

  "Not our shift, sir," Fox said. "And we're late, sir. Still short of men."

  "I gave you a new man tonight. Where is he? New man — aye — let's see . . ."

  As he spoke, MacGregor ran around the desks and snatched up the half-finished galley. "Well, Coffey, let's see your wurrk?" He spread the galley on the desk top, scanning it, block-reading not for sense but for typographical errors. Years of practice gave him an unerring eye for flaw, but tonight he saw no flaw. Four errors on the galley, four caught, so far. A new man? He did not believe it. He turned on Fox. "These aren't his marks. They're yours."

  It was a guess, but once he had made it, MacGregor snatched some of Fox's galleys off the spike and compared. "Aye, these are your marks," he said in triumph. "Coffey?"

  "Yes, sir."

  "Show me your other galleys."

  Behind his high desk, the composing room foreman had been watching. He saw the new man's face, red, confused, turn upwards towards his tormentor. Poor sod. The foreman stepped down from his desk, approached, stopping MacGregor in mid-shriek. "Your men are be-

  hind here, Mr. Mac," he said. "All this talk is holding up the work. You're short-staffed here, as usual. And we're late."

  "We're doing our best, damn ye!"

  But MacGregor turned away, spiked the galleys and made off without another word, fearful of a new defeat, a new infestation of mediators, arbitrators, international representatives and similar union incubi and succubi. The foreman winked at Coffey's bewildered face and returned to his desk. The linotypers, prim and efficient on their little stools, smiled as at an old and favorite joke and — monks performing a rite of exorcism — the proofreaders downed galleys and intoned a short chant of MacGregorian abuse. Then, the obscenities observed, Fox leaned across the desk and fed Coffey his first galley of the night. "All right," he said. "Coast's clear. Do your best."

  At ten the bell rang for supper break. At ten-fifteen it rang again and they went on to work until one. Sober now, Coffey found that he could do the job. Soon he was reading galleys only seconds slower than old Billy and half as quick as Fox. He was surprised, and pleased, because, all his life, do you see, he had been in jobs whose only purpose seemed to be to convince some higher-up that you were worth the money he was paying you. But in this job, you read your galley and made your corrections and, if you looked across the room, you could see the make-up men going on with the next step in the process. Within an hour or two, a newspaper would come off the press and tomorrow morning people would buy it, would read it over breakfast. You made something. There was no coming the old soldier, either. You signed your initials at the foot of each galley and if you let something slip, it could be traced back to you.

  It was a new and satisfying feeling.

  And so, at one in the morning, when Coffey rode home on the bus, a newly printed newspaper on his lap, he had, by his habitual processes of ratiocination, convinced himself that the day was not a defeat but a victory. A little victory. He had a job: he was working alongside a bunch of Canadians in a far-off country, pulling his weight with the best of them. As for Vera, she would be over her bad temper by now. He would make a cup of cocoa for her, bring her into the kitchen and tell her all about his evening. He would kiss her and they would say they were sorry, both of them. Hard-working Ginger. Not selfish, no. Doing the best he could.

  There were no lights on in the duplex when he let himself in. In the outer hall, he listened for signs of life as he emptied snow out of the turnups of his trousers. Quietly, he passed by Paulie's room and, in the darkened master bedroom, fumbled for the curtain drawstrings. The curtains screeched on their runners, opening with a quick flounce. Moonlight fell on his wife's slender body, wrapped like a furled sail in all the bed-sheets.

  "Veronica?" he whispered.

  But she slept. Ah well, let her sleep: he would make up with her tomorrow. He undressed in the moonlight, looking out of the window. Snow, dead and thick and white, shaded the arms of the tree opposite; wedged itself in clefts of branches; cake-iced the roofs of houses across the street. The city was quiet, its traffic noises muted by the snowfall. He yawned and reached for the curtain drawstrings, sending the rings screeching on their runners, closing the room to blackness again. He slipped into bed and lay, listening to her breathe. How strange life wasl Only this morning he had lain here beside her, happy after joy, not knowing what the day would bring. Only this afternoon he had walked away across the Palm

  Court, in dread of her leaving him. Only a few hours ago he had sat in a room full of machines, doing something he had never done before. How could people say life was dull? Ah, look at her now, asleep and at peace. If only there had been no bitterness, if only those things had not been said. If only he could take that part of the day away, erase it with a kiss.

  And why not? He snuggled against her. She was tall, but his chin touched the top of her head, his feet slipped under her soles, a pedestal for her feet. Oh, how warm and soft she was, her nightgown rucked about her waist. Warm she was. And warm he loved her.

  "Don't," she mumbled. "No."

  He smiled in the darkness and moved his hand up to cup her breast.

  "Stop it. Please, Gerry, stop."

  He lay very quiet. He could hear his own heart. She must hear it too; it was thumping like an engine. Slowly, he reached out and fondled her breasts, his loins cold, his heart hammering.

  "No, Gerry. Please. Not now."

  He took his hand away. Slowly, careful not to wake her, he turned his back to her and lay, eyes open in the dark, his large body still as a statue on the lid of a tomb. He listened to her breathe. The intake was regular, yet irregular in the way of sleep. She was asleep. Yes, she was dreaming a dream.

  Do you remember that summer you were stationed at the Curragh and you got a great crush on an eighteen-year-old girl who never even knew you fancied her? Didn't you dream about her many's a night that summer, and did that mean that you slept with her? Or even kissed her? Haven't you been unfaithful to Veronica a thousand times in dreams?

  Still, she only knows one Gerry. That long drink of

  water? Besides, she's thirty-five, five years older than he is. But he's a bachelor, he has a sports car and he's free with his money. And she wept her troubles to him the other day. He's why she wants to leave you. It's plain as the nose on your face.

  But was it? It could be a dream. One sentence in her sleep after fifteen years of marriage didn't make a whore of her, did it?

  He lay, his eyes open in the darkness. He blinked his eyes and felt something wet touch the corner of his mouth, seeping through the edges of his mustache. He was not going to boohoo like a baby, was he? Was he? No.

  But, suffering J! It was hard to hold on to his hopes.

  FouT Next morning, after she had fed him breakfast, she said she was going downtown to see about a job.

  "What job?"

  "It's a millinery place that's run by a friend of Gerry Grosvenor's. They need a saleslady."

  "Oh."

  "I won't be back for lunch," she said. "
And if you go out, you'd better buy something to put in your sandwiches tonight."

  "All right." He looked down at his plate. He had noticed she was wearing her good black suit.

  "Paulie?" she called. "Get a move on, you'll be late for school. Good-by, Ginger. Are you going to be at home all day?"

  "I suppose so."

  "I'll phone you later on, then."

  He heard the front door close. No kiss good-by. He sat, his tea growing cold, hardly noticing Paulie, who rushed in, ate, and fled late to school. Let her go. Let them all go.

  A ruler went tickety-tak-tak down the staircase which connected his apartment with the landlady's upstairs.

  "M'sieur? Want to play with me?"

  He looked up, met eyes lonelier than his. "Come on in, Michel," he said. "Let's have a game, the pair of us."

  The little boy had brought his building blocks. Coffey cleared a space at the kitchen table and gravely, thirty-nine and five years old, they built a house with a long sugar-lump chimney. They played at building for more than an hour until Michel's grandmother called from upstairs.

  Alone again, Coffey sucked a sugar lump. . . . Maybe if he went down to Grosvenor's office, ostensibly to discuss the proofreading job, and somehow brought the conversation around to Veronica? If he had any gumption at all, wouldn't he see in Grosvenor's eyes the guilt or innocence of last night's phrase?

  All right. He shaved, dressed himself in his suit of Dromore tweed, and took a bus to the financial district. It was a quarter to twelve when he got off the bus. He went into a drugstore, already crowded with typists on their lunch hour, and in a phone booth at the rear, surrounded by display cards showing smiling girls half-naked under sun lamps, he phoned Gerry Grosvernor.

  No, Mr. Grosvenor had just stepped out for a moment. Would he mind calling back, please? And what was his name, again? Coffey. Yes, he would call back. He hung up; stared at the display cards of pretty, half-naked girls. There were so many pretty girls in the world. Why couldn't that long drink of water find one, instead of coming after a friend's wife, a woman of thirty-five who was not that pretty? Suffering J!