Home Truths (33 page)

I was deeply happy. It was one of the periods of inexplicable grace when every day is a new parcel one unwraps, layer on layer of tissue paper covering bits of crystal, scraps of words in a foreign language, pure white stones. I spent my lunch hours writing in notebooks, which I kept locked in my desk. The men never bothered me, apart from trying to feed me little pieces of cake. They were all sad when I began to smoke – I remember that. I could write without hearing anyone, but poetry was leaving me. It was not an abrupt removal but like a recurring tide whose high-water mark recedes inch by inch. Presently I was deep inland and the sea was gone. I would mourn it much later: it was such a gentle separation at the time that I scarcely noticed. I had notebooks stuffed with streets and people: my journals were full of “but what he
really
must have meant was …” There were endless political puzzles I tried to solve by comparing one thing with another, but of course nothing matched; I had not lost my adolescent habit of private, passionate manifestos. If politics were nothing but chess – Mr. Tracy’s ways of sliding out of conviction – K was surely Social Justice and Q Extreme Morality. I was certain of this, and that after the war – unless we were completely swallowed up, like those Canadian battalions at Hong Kong – K and Q would envelop the world. Having no one to listen to, I could not have a thought without writing it down. There were pages and pages of dead butterflies, wings without motion or lift. I began to ration my writing, for fear I would dream through life as my father had done. I was afraid I had inherited a poisoned gene from him, a vocation without a gift. He had spent his own short time like a priest in charge of a relic, forever expecting the blessed blood to liquefy. I had no assurance I was not the same. I was so like him in some ways that a
man once stopped me in front of the Bell Telephone building on Beaver Hall Hill and said, “Could you possibly be Angus Muir’s sister?” That is how years telescope in men’s minds. That particular place must be the windiest in Montreal, for I remember dust and ragged papers blowing in whirlpools and that I had to hold my hair. I said, “No, I’m not,” without explaining that I was not his sister but his daughter. I had heard people say, referring to me but not knowing who I was, “He had a daughter, but apparently she died.” We couldn’t
both
be dead. Having come down on the side of life, I kept my distance. Writing now had to occupy an enormous space. I had lived in New York until a year before and there were things I was sick with missing. There was no theatre, no music; there was one museum of art with not much in it. There was not even a free public lending library in the sense of the meaning that would have been given the words “free public lending library” in Toronto or New York. The municipal library was considered a sinister joke. There was a persistent, apocryphal story among English Canadians that an American philanthropic foundation (the Carnegie was usually mentioned) had offered to establish a free public lending library on condition that its contents were not to be censored by the provincial government of Quebec or by the Catholic Church, and that the offer had been turned down. The story may not have been true but its persistence shows the political and cultural climate of Montreal then. Educated French Canadians summed it up in shorter form: their story was that when you looked up “Darwin” in the card index of the Bibliothèque de Montréal you found “See anti-Darwin.” A Canadian actress I knew in New York sent me the first published text of
The Skin of Our Teeth
. I wrote imploring her to tell me everything about the
production – the costumes, the staging, the voices. I’ve never seen it performed – not read it since the end of the war. I’ve been told that it doesn’t hold, that it is not rooted in anything specific. It was then; its Ice Age was Fascism. I read it the year of Dieppe, in a year when “Russia” meant “Leningrad,” when Malta could be neither fed nor defended. The Japanese were anywhere they wanted to be. Vast areas of the world were covered with silence and ice. One morning I read a little notice in the
Gazette
that Miss Margaret Urn would be taking auditions for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. I presented myself during my lunch hour with
The Skin of Our Teeth
and a manuscript one-act play of my own, in case. I had expected to find queues of applicants but I was the only one. Miss Urn received me in a small room of a dingy office suite on St. Catherine Street. We sat down on opposite sides of a table. I was rendered shy by her bearing, which had a headmistress quality, and perplexed by her accent – it was the voice any North American actor will pick up after six months of looking for work in the West End, but I did not know that. I opened
The Skin of Our Teeth
and began to read. It was floating rather than reading, for I had much of it by heart. When I read “Have you milked the mammoth?” Miss Urn stopped me. She reached over the table and placed her hand on the page.

“My dear child, what is this rubbish?” she said.

I stammered, “It is a … a play in New York.”

Oh, fool. The worst thing to say. If only I had said, “Tallulah Bankhead,” adding swiftly, “London, before the war.” Or, better, “An Edwardian farce. Queen Alexandra, deaf though she was, much appreciated the joke about the separation of ‘m’ and ‘n.’ ” “A play in New York” evoked a look Canada was making me familiar with: amusement, fastidious
withdrawal, gentle disdain. What a strange city to have a play in, she might have been thinking.

“Try reading this,” she said.

I shall forget everything about the war except that at the worst point of it I was asked to read
Dear Octopus
. If Miss Urn had never heard of Thornton Wilder I had never heard of Dodie Smith. I read what I took to be parody. Presently it dawned on me these were meant to be real people. I broke up laughing because of Sabina, Fascism, the Ice Age that was perhaps upon us, because of the one-act play still in my purse. She took the book away from me and closed it and said I would, or would not, be hearing from her.

N
ow there was excitement in the office: a second woman had been brought in. Mrs. Ireland was her name. She had an advanced degree in accountancy and she was preparing a doctorate in some branch of mathematics none of the men were familiar with. She was about thirty-two. Her hair was glossy and dark; she wore it in braids that became a rich mahogany color when they caught the light. I admired her hair, but the rest of her was angry-looking – flushed cheeks, red hands and arms. The scarf around her throat looked as though it had been wound and tied in a fury. She tossed a paper on my desk and said, “Check this. I’m in a hurry.” Chief Engineer looked up, looked at her, looked down. A play within the play, a subplot, came to life; I felt it exactly as children can sense a situation they have no name for. In the afternoon she said, “Haven’t you done that yet?” She had a positive, hammering sort of voice. It must have carried as far as the portraits in the hall. Chief Engineer unrolled a large map showing the mineral
resources of eastern Canada and got behind it. Mrs. Ireland called, to the room in general, “Well, is she supposed to be working for me or isn’t she?” Oh? I opened the bottom drawer of my desk, unlocked the middle drawer, began to pack up my personal affairs. I saw that I’d need a taxi: I had about three pounds of manuscripts and notes, and what seemed to amount to a wardrobe. In those days girls wore white gloves to work; I had two extra pairs of these, and a makeup kit, and extra shoes. I began filling my wastebasket with superfluous cargo. The room had gone silent: I can still see Bertie Knox’s ratty little eyes judging, summing up, taking the measure of this new force. Mr. Tracy, in his mauve glasses, hands in his pockets, came strolling out of his office; it was a sort of booth, with frosted-glass panels that did not go up to the ceiling. He must have heard the shouting and then the quiet. He and Mr. Curran and Mr. Elwitt, the diabetic one, were higher in rank than Chief Engineer, higher than Office Manager; they could have eaten Supervisor for tea and no one would dare complain. He came along easily – I never knew him to rush. I remember now that Chief Engineer called him “Young Tracy,” because of his father; “Old Tracy” – the real Tracy, so to speak – was the one who’d gone bust in the Depression. That was why Young Tracy had this job. He wasn’t all that qualified, really; not so different from me. He sat down on Bertie Knox’s desk with his back to him.

“Well, Bolshie,” he said to me. This was a long joke: it had to do with my political views, as he saw them, and it was also a reference to a character in an English comic called “Pip and Squeak” that he and I had both read as children – we’d discussed it once. Pip and Squeak were a dog and a penguin. They had a son called Wilfred, who was a rabbit. Bolshie
seemed to be a sort of acquaintance. He went around carrying one of those round black bombs with a sputtering fuse. He had a dog, I think – a dog with whiskers. I had told Mr. Tracy how modern educators were opposed to “Pip and Squeak.” They thought that more than one generation of us had been badly misled by the unusual family unit of dog, penguin, and rabbit. It was argued that millions of children had grown up believing that if a dog made advances to a female penguin she would produce a rabbit. “Not a
rabbit,”
said Mr. Tracy reasonably.
“Wilfred.”

I truly liked him. He must have thought I was going to say something now, if only to rise to the tease about “Bolshie,” but I was in the grip of that dazzling anger that is a form of snow blindness, too. I could not speak, and anyway didn’t want to. I could only go on examining a pencil to see if it was company property or mine – as if that mattered. “Are you taking the day off or trying to leave me?” he said. I can feel that tense listening of men pretending to work. “I was looking over your application form,” he said. “D’you know that your father knew my father? Yep. A long time ago. My father took it into his head to commission a mural for a plant in Sorel. Brave thing to do. Nobody did anything like that. Your father said it wasn’t up his street. Suggested some other guy. My old man took the
two
of them down to Sorel. Did a lot of clowning around, but the Depression was just starting, so the idea fell through. My old man enjoyed it, though.”

“Clowning around” could not possibly have been my father, but then the whole thing was so astonishing. “I should have mentioned it to you when you first came in,” he said, “but I didn’t realize it myself. There must be a million people called Muir; I happened to be looking at your form because
apparently you’re due for a raise.” He whistled something for a second or two, then laughed and said, “Nobody ever quits around here. It can’t be done. It upsets the delicate balance between labor and government. You don’t want to do that. What do you want to do that for?”

“Mr. Curran doesn’t like me.”

“Mr. Curran is a brilliant man,” he said. “Why, if you knew Curran’s whole story you’d” – he paused – “you’d stretch out the hand of friendship.”

“I’ve been asking and asking for a chair that doesn’t wobble.”

“Take the day off,” he said. “Go to a movie or something. Tomorrow we’ll start over.” His life must have been like that. “You know, there’s a war on. We’re all needed. Mrs. Ireland has been brought here from …”

“From Trahnah,” said Mrs. Ireland.

“Yes, from Toronto, to do important work. I’ll see something gets done about that chair.”

He stood up, hands in his pockets, slouching, really; gave an affable nod all round. The men didn’t see; their noses were almost touching their work. He strolled back to his glass cubicle, whistling softly. The feeling in the room was like the sight of a curtain raised by the wind now sinking softly.

“Oh, Holy Hannah!” Mrs. Ireland burst out. “I thought this was supposed to be a wartime agency!”

No one replied.
My father knew your father. I’ll see something gets done about that chair
. So that is how it works among men. To be noted, examined, compared.

Meanwhile I picked up the paper she’d tossed on my desk hours before and saw that it was an actuarial equation. I waited until the men had stopped being aware of us and took it over
and told her I could not read it, let alone check it. It had obviously been some kind of test.

She said, “Well, it was too much to hope for. I have to single-handedly work out some wartime overtime pensions plan taking into account the cost of living and the earnest hope that the Canadian dollar won’t sink.” And I was to have been her assistant. I began to admire the genius someone – Assistant Chief Engineer Macaulay, perhaps – had obviously seen in me. Mrs. Ireland went on, “I gather after this little comic opera we’ve just witnessed that you’re the blue-eyed girl around here.” (Need I say that I’d hear this often? That the rumor I was Mr. Tracy’s mistress now had firm hold on the feminine element in the room – though it never gained all the men – particularly on the biddies, the two or three old girls loafing along to retirement, in comfortable corsets that gave them a sort of picket fence around the middle? That the obscene anonymous notes I sometimes found on my desk – and at once unfairly blamed on Bertie Knox – were the first proof I had that prolonged virginity can be the mother of invention?) “You can have your desk put next to mine,” said Mrs. Ireland. “I’ll try to dig some good out of you.”

But I had no intention of being mined by Mrs. Ireland. Remembering what Mr. Tracy had said about the hand of friendship I told her, truthfully, that it would be a waste for her and for me. My name was down to do documentary-film work, for which I thought I’d be better suited; I was to be told as soon as a vacancy occurred.

“Then you’ll have a new girl,” I said. “You can teach her whatever you like.”

“Girl?”
She could not keep her voice down, ever. “There’ll
not be a girl in this office again, if I have a say. Girls make me sick, sore, and weary.”

I thought about that for a long time. I had believed it was only because of the men that girls were parked like third-class immigrants at the far end of the room – the darkest part, away from the windows – with the indignity of being watched by Supervisor, whose whole function was just that. But there, up on the life raft, stepping on girls’ fingers, was Mrs. Ireland, too. If that was so, why didn’t Mrs. Ireland get along with the men, and why did they positively and openly hate her – openly especially after Mr. Tracy’s extraordinary and instructive sorting out of power?