The Night Travellers

8. Mary's Tape (continued)

8 Mary's Tape(continued) Yesterday I ran into Madeleine Spivak. She and her husband, George, had property just around the corner from Seymour Street. Jeff and I had an apartment there when we stopped living with the Hungarians. By then I was six months along with Kathy and big as a cow. Madeleine worked in her husband's rental office on McKay Street and so found the property for us, a listing of theirs. She used to come over to see us from time to time. It started honestly, I suppose, with some idea of helping us, seeing after us. But I had to go to the hospital twice before Kathy actually came and I was sick a lot. Jeff confided in her, I had to guess. She was around more often than not. The first thing any of us knew, she had fallen for him. Jeff never had to put out much energy to get himself fallen for. Madeleine Spivak was married to a Hungarian real estate dealer. Hungarians were all over the place. They came out to Canada in 1956, at the time of the revolt. She herself was brought up French Catholic, Quebec variety, though she spoke English without any accent, from birth, we supposed. She thought we were pilgrim wanderers. She was right. To ourselves , as well, we were pilgrim wanderers, holy and superb, homeless , trusting, lost and innocent in a strange land. We were also, it was obvious, far better than the public image of mindless hippies, lice in their beards, acid in their veins. Madeleine Spivak at least had the sense to see us as we were: Jeff an intellectual,I a talented dancer. And she—dark, sexy, approaching forty, covering the coarse gray strands that were intruding like weeds in her heavy hair. It was Madeleine Spivak who got us to the hospital when Kathy 166 Voices from Afar 167 declared herself unmistakably on the way. She called to find we had waited thirty minutes for a taxi after the ambulance people said it would take them an hour or two, and we had no real prospect but having to struggle with it right there at two in the morning on a night of blinding snow. "I'm coming now," said Madeleine. And she came. Jeff wrapped me in blankets up to my head, held me on the backseat of the big Spivak car. She had thrown a mink coat over her nightgown, not bothering to dress. Out of the night at every turning, down every street we drove, all I could see was snow, materializing white out of the infinite dark, dark deeper than any pit could be but at some point in itself giving birth to snow, whirling whiteness out of the black depths. Then Kathy. It was a troubled winter. She cried a lot. I had to go to the doctor over and over. The last thing I felt like was sex. For a while I hated the thought of it. Sex was a robber in disguise, was what I said. (Aloud? Maybe.) Sex had taken my freedom, I said. (To him? With tears, or anger, or both? I think maybe I did.) I found myself getting robbed again, losingJeff to this chic French item, who had pledged herself to look after us, but who now was out of her head with love. As they say in books, tension mounted. That bitter winter could hardly be called any picnic, and just as it ended Jeff left us both. Me and Madeleine Spivak, both out in the cold. He'd done little or nothing since he returned from the Chicago orgy but interviews with the tribe of resisters who had come up to Canada, sore from their bruising experiences at home. But all of a sudden things waked up for him. I found him one afternoon, in from a walk with Kathy, with lots of small bottles and wads of cotton spread out on the table, a smell of acid swirling around, sulphuric and something else. Jeff had recipes for everything. He got them out of government pamphlets and kids' magazines. He claimed he could even make napalm. I didn't know why anybody would want to, but he said it was useful for burning up records in draft offices. It had gotten warm enough to run up a window and let the smell out. What he was doing was altering his fingerprints. Something was up. [3.131.110.169...