I saw Ann the other day. I was walking down Granville Street, and I could smell the sea, that wild pungent smell that always grabs me. It had been raining, and the air was damp as only Vancouver air can be. I was on the side of the street where Hudson’s Bay still stands, amazingly, all six floors of it, where I once stole a cheap hairbrush. Not because I didn’t have the money to pay, but because the two salesgirls were yakking away, I was late on my lunch hour, and I just got tired of waiting. There is no excuse.
But back to Ann. She was sitting in the window of one of the few cafes still allowed to be open. I knew it was her immediately, although it was all a long time ago. She was with a younger man. A son, perhaps. The same long rectangular face, the pale skin, that bony elegance. She looked older, of course, and a little ragged. Her hair, which she used to wear piled up on her head and skewered with a big metal hairpin, was loose now, and the black had softened into grey. I wondered if she still got those little flushed pink discs on her cheeks when she became agitated.
We never knew what happened to her afterwards, although Sandy heard she had taken a Greyhound bus to Florida, Fort Lauderdale, where she had an aunt, the one whose framed photo she kept on the desk. She never spoke of family, and we assumed, Sandy and I, that the aunt was it, that given the climate in Florida, she would stay.
So it was something of a shock to see her sitting there in a café on Granville, and I had a brief, absurd notion that she’d been here all along, hiding out under our noses, that she’d never left. I half expected her to produce a pack of Marlboros and light up while I watched, the way she used to at her desk – unimaginable these days – her face settling into that blank stare, blowing smoke across the table.
Mr. Biernes had hired Ann for her typing. Even by law office standards, where speeds of 100 were common, she was amazing. Her long fingers, the nails a glossy blood red, would fly over the keys. I used to picture her at night sitting in her pajamas as she watched the news, touching up her nails. She lived alone in a gracious old building on Beach Street that was torn down years ago and replaced with condominiums.
The Law Offices of Arthur L. Biernes occupied a small suite on the 5th floor of an old professional building on Hastings, across from Pacific Plaza. Mr. Biernes must have been around 40 then. Confident and hardworking, handsome in a clunky sort of way, he would arrive most days by 8.30, barring a court appearance, wearing one of his “sincere suits,” as he called them, brown or grey and not terribly well cut, a silk tie that his wife had picked out, no doubt, and polished Oxfords.
“He always looks so smart,” I said to Sandy that first week.
“Doesn’t he?” She smiled knowingly, as she inserted a Subpoena into her typewriter. “We like to think his wife does his shoes every day. Come here, Arthur. We can´t let you out with your shoes looking like that.” The three of us laughed.
“Come here, Monica,” she said to me one day, standing at the window. “I want you to see something.” It was lunchtime, and we were alone in the office. She was a pretty girl, ballsy and quick and efficient, with thick blonde hair and pale blue eyes. She was engaged to be married in June, to Richard, and spent her lunch breaks poring over cruise brochures and wedding dress catalogues.
I walked dutifully over and looked down at Hastings Street, which was busy with people and cars. I was wondering what I was there to see, why she’d called me over – was there going to be a parade? – when Ann stepped out into the crosswalk. I knew it was her by the red wool coat that she wore every day in winter, unless we were having one of the warm spells we sometimes get in January. It stood out against all the black and grey.
“She’s going to meet Mr. Biernes at his Club,” Sandy said softly, as though she was covering a snooker match. “They will sit on one of the couches in the Lounge, have a quick martini. Then they will go the small hotel down the block.”
I was shocked, stunned. That type of thing didn’t happen in Salmon Arm. Or if it did, I didn’t know about it. My mouth probably fell open. As I say, it was a long time ago.
“Does Mrs. Biernes know?”
“Good heavens, no! She thinks he’s at his Club. And he is most days, but once in a while he spends time with Ann.” She gave me a knowing little grin.
“Maybe they’re just having lunch.” I said, turning away.
“Oh, Monica. They’re not ‘just having lunch’ as you put it. Those hotels – or motels, whatever they are – they don’t do lunch. They rent rooms. And if they were, having lunch, why don’t they just say ‘We’re going to have lunch. See you later’? I don’t think we would fall off our seats in shock. Instead, he leaves at his usual time and then she leaves ten or fifteen minutes later and goes over to meet him. And we’re all supposed to be fooled.” She went back to her desk. “Look at her face when she comes in, look at her cheeks. They’re always flushed when she’s been with him. Like a clown.”
“But how can you be so sure?”
“I followed them once.”
“You followed them!?”
“Yes, I followed them. Just after it started, the end of summer, when we got the Higgins case. It wasn’t difficult. They’re reckless. It’s as though they don’t care.”
“The Higgins case,” or Clara Louise Higgins, Guardian Ad Litem for Thomas Lee Higgins, a minor, vs. Colonial Cabinets, an Ontario corporation, etal – was a wrongful death suit. Tommy Lee had died in his bedroom, at three years old, when he pulled open the top drawer of a dresser made by Colonial Cabinets. The dresser fell on top of him, crushing him to death. We’d been retained by his mother, Clara Louise Higgins, a large noisy widow with five other children, all of them under 17, leading Ann to observe, as Sandy lamented yet again the tragedy of it all, “Well, she does have five more of them. She has a full house. And it’s one less mouth to feed.”
I was 19 and living in a studio in English Bay where the mice ran under the Murphy bed. I had no car. But I had a job and I could walk to work. Mr. Biernes had been a friend of my father’s for years and had handled my mother’s will when she died of cancer. When he heard I was taking a typing course, he asked me if I’d ever thought of being a legal secretary. Ann would train me, he said. She was good.
And I liked it. I liked the peculiar energy of a law firm, the dramas, the routines, the procedures, the oddball clients, even the terminology. Typing the first page of a Complaint – Comes now (John Doe) and alleges – a lone trumpeter in a velvet beret would leap into my mind. I liked the way Latin showed up everywhere.
I liked the mass of documents Ann and I produced every day – the complaints, the motions, the interminable sets of Interrogatories – ‘discovery,’ it’s called – and taking them all in their neat little envelopes to the Post Office on Burrard Street on my way home.
I liked standing at the window late on a winter afternoon, as the sky darkened, watching tankers glide into harbor, office workers scurrying home through wet streets or to meet up with someone, somewhere warm and dry. I would picture drivers cocooned in their cars at the crosswalk, windshield wipers swishing back and forth, as they lit a cigarette or switched channels. I felt connected to things. I was lucky, and I knew it, to be there.
I was on an errand when I ran into Mrs. Biernes a few weeks after I’d stood at the window with Sandy. I had to file a Motion and decided to combine that with my lunchhour. I was at the lipstick counter in Hudson´s Bay, wavering deliciously between Pink Brandy (Max Factor) and Le Pink Drama (Lancôme) when I heard a voice say, “Fancy seeing you here, Monica!” and a heart-shaped face, beneath perfectly cut blonde hair, smiled up at me. (I get my height from my father.) “How is Arthur treating you?”
“Very well,” I said, nodding. “Mr. Biernes is a pleasure to work for.” I was on the tip of saying ‘your husband.’ “How are you?”
“I’m fine.” She pointed at one of the smudges on my hand. “I’d go with that one. Perfect with your skin and that lovely brown hair. I’m on my way to see him right now, actually, at the Club. I don’t like it there much, frankly, all those men talking law. But I’m hardly ever in town, so I thought I’d surprise him. What do you think?” She smiled at me coyly, as though the two of them were newlyweds.
I had tried since that day to split Mr. Biernes into two, the friend of my father who had given me a job – “Nice work on that Petition, Monica! – and the man who spent time at his Club. With Ann it was harder. I wanted to pretend one minute that I knew nothing and was as naïve as the day I’d arrived, and the next to warn her, to be Cassandra. I avoided the window at lunchtime. It was something I could not get my mind around. After a while I stopped trying.
“I think it’s a great idea!” I said. “He will be delighted.”
At the courthouse, there was a long wait. It was past 2.30 when I got back. Sandy was sitting there alone. Mr. Biernes’ door was shut.
Everything was gone from Ann’s desk. The photo of her aunt in Fort Lauderdale, the glass ashtray, the Marlboro Lites, the peppermints, the jar of Nivea, the Penguin version of Anna Karenina. All that was left were the typewriter and phone, a battered dictionary, and a stapler.
I’d heard her using it just that morning, with its rhythmic little thud. It seemed an age ago now, a gilded time where the sassy bon mot was forever forthcoming, the drama of sex and love unburdened by reality, and Ann would always be there behind an acrid haze of smoke when I walked in, overpriced Cappuccino in hand, rumpled and witless but ready.
“What happened?” I sat down, a ghastly premonition sliding over me.
“She’s gone.”
“Gone?”
“Yes, Monica. She’s gone.”
The word hung there amid the wooden desks and the chairs and the filing cabinets. The only sound was the metallic purr of Sandy´s typewriter.
The files Ann had been working on, six of them, were now on my desk, next to the Higgins file, with its huge black capitals – ‘WRONGFUL DEATH’ – that Ann had put there this morning. “All it needs is a skull and bones.”
Sandy turned her typewriter off, took a deep breath, and looked at me.
“Mrs. Biernes came into the office. Which she hardly ever does. So I was surprised, and I was all ready to have a nice chat. But she said Hello to me, and that was it. Straight into his office. Not a word to Ann. She didn’t even knock! Oh, well, she’s his wife.”
“She was in there I don’t know, ten minutes, maybe a little more. It was all very quiet. Except for Ann typing away a mile a minute. Not a flinch, not a word. Then the door opens and out she comes. She says Goodbye to me and leaves. Ann was still typing.”
“Then he buzzed Ann, and she went in, all very calm, and I heard voices, I heard the two of them talking. Low. I was at the copier when she came out. I heard her going through her desk, opening and shutting things, walking around, getting stuff.”
“I didn’t know what to do, Monica, what to say. I felt sick.”
There was anguish in her face. And something I had not seen before. Things happen, I was learning, and all you can do is watch and hang on.
“Finally, she had her stuff, she had her coat on and her gloves. She never goes anywhere without her gloves this time of year. ‘I’m going,’ she says, standing at my desk. ‘I’m sure you’ve figured that out. You may even have figured out why.’ And she gave me such a strange look, you know that blank look she has, as if there are things she knows you couldn’t possibly understand. She said, ‘I hope everything goes well for you and Richard. With the wedding. Tell Monica I have enjoyed working with her. She’ll be a good legal secretary.’”
Mr. Biernes didn’t replace Ann, even with a temp. Maybe there was too little time with the trial pending. Maybe he didn’t want another woman sitting there with a baleful gaze, blowing smoke rings, hair piled dangerously on her head. Maybe he thought he would give me a chance.
If he did, I took it. I worked hard. I put in long days. Ann’s words would ring in my ears. “Don’t forget the Proof of Service, Monica, to all parties. Even Jake Herlihy, a former alcoholic, we all know, but a good lawyer, all the same.”
Some nights I was there till 7 or 8. I would drag the plastic cover over Ann’s – now my – Selectric and put it to sleep for the night. I’d stop on the way home at a Chinese place on Robson, long gone, and get a carton of Chop Suey or Ginger Beef, and I would eat it on the couch while I watched the news, across from the Murphy bed.
One day a week later, around 11 in the morning, Mr. Biernes opened his door.
“Monica, have you got the Schiller Subpoena?”
“It should be with the others, Mr. Biernes. They were all issued the same day.”
“Well, it isn’t. I’ve looked.”
“Let me check,” I said, suddenly queasy, following him into his office. “I’m sure it’s in there somewhere.”
Robert Schiller was our star witness. A retired and transient product engineer, he had done a study on dressers and the tendency of those made by Colonial Cabinets to lack structural stability and fall forward when an upper drawer was pulled open – by a lad of three, say – causing injury or death. He had concluded in his study that Colonial Cabinets had been aware that their particle board dressers were defective and had continued to make and sell them anyway.
Ann had tracked him down in South Carolina and interviewed him on the phone. His name, address, number, and qualifications, as well as her summary of the interview and the report, had been in the file, all of it paper clipped to the Subpoena.
All of it was gone. The Subpoena, the paperwork, the summary, the report. Everything. It was as if Peter Schiller no longer existed.
Sandy phoned Ann repeatedly. No answer. She went to the apartment on Beach Street, the second time banging on the door and peering in through the living room window. The place looked empty.
It was not, as they say, the end of the world. We had a good case. Juries are sympathetic to 3-year old boys when particle board dressers fall on them and kill them. And to their mothers, no matter how many children they have.
But Mr. Biernes faltered. The zest went out of him. I think he was shocked that Ann had acted with such fury, had created Peter Schiller so capably only then to assassinate him. Passing his door, I would see him at his desk looking lost, shaken. Had they been in love?
He began to forget the names of clients, some of them people he’d known for years. He missed appointments, deadlines, once even a court appearance. His “Good morning, Ladies” began to sound forced, all the more so now there were just two of us ladies to hear it.
Jake Herlihy, representing Colonial Cabinets and also a member of the Club, sensed this, of course, and he offered to settle the case. When Mr. Biernes emerged from his office and told us the sum that Tommy’s brief little life had been deemed worth, we were shocked. Clara Louise didn’t think much of it either and left the office in tears, along with the three youngest of her remaining children, who had spent their time rolling around on the couch in the 5th floor law library watching reruns of Happy Days.
As Sandy shepherded them noisily out of the office, the smell of defeat in the air, I imagined Ann at her typewriter, pale and impassive, glancing up for a fraction of a second. “Take it, Clara. It’s the best you’ll get. You’ve still got the other five.”
I stayed two more years with Mr. Biernes. And he held on. The marriage held on, too. Mrs. Biernes would phone the office now and then and speak to Sandy about something or other, but I never saw her again.
Then I went to California and lived there for many years. But I came back. I missed the smell of the harbor, the tugboats puttering through English Bay at dusk, the downtown streets on winter nights.
Sandy married her Richard, they had two boys, and it seemed like a good marriage. Then there was a long drawn-out divorce, with much bickering over custody, and she went back to school to get a law degree. She practiced in New Westminster for many years. Personal Injury, of course.
“You saw Ann?! Where?” She is almost spilling her coffee. She is a pretty woman still, with a sense of money about her, comfort, assurance. She has done well. I am tempted to remind her of her sentry duty at the window on Hastings Street. But I don’t. I have waited until she is settled on the couch and has a croissant to tell her my news of Ann.
“I can’t believe it! Did you go in and say Hello?”
“No.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. I wasn’t ready. It’s odd, isn’t it? I’ve always imagined that I would, if I saw her, but when it came to it, I didn’t. If I see her again, I will. Vancouver is a small town.” I am not sure this is true, but I say it anyway.
We sat in silence.
Then she said quietly, looking not at me but out the sliding doors toward the water. “I know what you mean. I do. You meet these people in life, and they have this big effect on you. Huge, sometimes. And you don’t know why. You don’t even understand it yourself. And you don’t want to lose that.”
After I didn’t go into the café, I walked home in the rain, lighter now. When I got my divorce settlement, I had some money, enough for the down payment on a condo. It’s on Beach Street, just two blocks from where Ann used to live, in the building where Sandy had peered in through the living room windows and banged on the door in desperation.
At home, I pour myself a glass of Malbec in one of my nice Waterford glasses, and I put up my Christmas tree. It takes me a while, getting it into the pot without making too much of a mess, and the string of little red and blue and gold lights wrapped around the tree the right way, working from the center out, as my mother did it, so the electric cord doesn’t show. The ornaments, the tinsel. I am not a Believer, but doing a tree always feels sacred.
Then I watch the news. More infections, more despair.
It is late when I slide open the heavy glass door to my balcony and step out into the damp night air. The rain has stopped, the sky is exhausted. All around me in the stillness I hear branches dripping. There is a faint whiff off the Strait. In the distance are the lights of Kitsilano. Somewhere over there I imagine Ann with her son, people in the kitchen, cleaning up after a meal, grandchildren.
Inside, the lights on my tree flash steadily, warmly. I leave them on at night so the tugboat captains can see them.
