The Meeting Point (41 page)

She cried and cried; and walked out of the hospital crying, until she realized she was in a taxi riding back to Marina Boulevard, back to the house, in Forest Hill.

As she pays the taxi driver she pulls the letter from Lonnie out of her pocket, by mistake; and this she carries in her hand upstairs, into her apartment. She reads, but she does not know
what Lonnie is really saying to her, although she reads:
But for old times sake, I begging you to send down a few dollars because St Matthias Church having the annual outing, and I am naked as a bird’s arse. I need a new suit. So see what you could do. Your loving man, Lonnie. PS Roses are red/Roses are blue/My love is true/Until I dead. Lonnie
.

… hours later, she was holding the letter from Lonnie in her hand, thinking of Lonnie, thinking of her need of Lonnie; or of Henry. (The parked car was no longer there, she noticed. So the man, whoever he was, couldn’t be dead.) “Oh Lonnie, poor Lonnie,” she said. She heard Mr. Burrmann come in. And she became very frightened to be left in the house with him, alone. She gripped Lonnie’s letter firmly in her hand, for protection from Mr. Burrmann. She was thinking of Estelle, and of the man who had been in the waiting-room with her. Then the telephone rang. The hospital must be calling her, she thought. When she took up the receiver, she heard Dots’s voice, although she couldn’t follow all she was saying: “ … and I never knew that this place was so blasted cruel, Bernice, gal. Jesus God! when I see Henry’s face this morning … six o’clock this morning, Henry returned Boysie’s car that he borrowed last night … this morning when I rested my eyes on that poor man’s face, Jesus God, Bernice … and nobody, not even the police, can’t tell me nothing. Boysie, and Mrs. Hunter ripped hell when they saw Henry … but not one blasted person in the whole of Toronto can’t or won’t say how Henry come to get his face smashed in, his eyes swell up big big till they almost dropping out of his head.… Jesus God! this is a savage world.…” Dots went on talking and talking.