Montreal Stories (34 page)

“It’s them or us,” said Leo. “England forever!” He sounded a bit crazy. He couldn’t have heard it at home: his father hated the English.

What did my aunt mean by “missing,” I used to wonder. How did you know you were missed: I had never missed my parents, and their letters showed no longing to see me but simply told me to be good. People in Châtelroux, when they talked about the last war or the next, said, “You’ve got to die sometime.” In St. George’s Anglican Church my aunt and I droned in unison that we believed in the resurrection of the body, though common evidence spoke against such a thing. Leo may have seen a brief future in the Army as an improvement over the immediate prospect, stuck in a classroom where he was a head taller than his teacher. Perhaps he was just exercising his native talent for saying whatever might appeal. He once boasted to my aunt that, at thirteen, he had tried to join the Mac-Paps—the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion, the Canadians fighting Franco. It was no more preposterous than his father’s claim to have played rugby for Ireland: Mr. Quale was built like a jockey and had never been outside Quebec.

You expected people like the Quales to be undersized.
They descended from immigrants known to other British incomers as “Glasgow runts.” The term has vanished: it takes only two generations, no time in real time, to acquire strong teeth and large hands and feet and a long backbone. Only aversions and fears, the stuff of racial memory, are handed down intact.

To recall the Quales around their supper table, with the radio turned right up, three or four saucepans bubbling on the stove, everyone eating something different, Mr. Quale yelling back at the radio during the news broadcast, laying down the law on England, or Quebec politics, or the Spanish Loyalists (“Every last man a louse” did for them all) is to see in deep perspective the Gorbals of Glasgow, where their parents had started out, and farther away, thin on the horizon, the trampling of Ireland. Mr. and Mrs. Quale belong to the first race of Irish, black-haired, driven underground, their great gods shrunk to leprechauns. Leo is the Norse marauder, hopelessly astray in the dark. Lily seems delicate, at least to the eye, with pale fine hair: a recent prototype, if you count in centuries.

Weekdays Mr. Quale got up at five and took the train to Montreal, where he was a plainclothes officer on the police force. He did not know French but could cause the arrest of people who did not understand English. Usually he came back in the middle of the afternoon and sat on a bench outside the railway station reading the Montreal
Star
until about five, the Quales’ suppertime. Their neighbors said Old Lady Quale gave him no peace to read the crime news at home. She thought a husband was supposed to keep moving, emptying the water pan under the icebox, examining for short circuits the loops of wiring that hung in fronds all over the house.

She had eyes that were fierce and round, and with her flat face and little beaked nose made me think of an owl. She screamed at children who walked on her lumpy, dried-up flower beds, at drivers who parked delivery vans in front of
her door; but there were days on end when she had nothing to say, and peered out of some private darkness to the light. Then, all at once normal again, in whatever degree any Quale normality could amount to, she would start to predict the family future. It was as if she had been granted a vision during her silent trance. Lily was going to be in trouble at an early age. (“In trouble” meant unmarried and pregnant. As Lily was believed not to know how pregnancy started, the prophecy had to be left to drift, like a canoe with nobody in it.) Leo could expect a career of panhandling in downtown Montreal. Mr. Quale was sure to be fired from the police force, for inertia, while Mrs. Quale was promised an old age of taking in washing.

Hearing it, the children went on eating their supper, unmoved. Family conversation usually slanted in a single direction. “You’ll see I was right!” and “Believe you me, one day you’ll wish you’d listened!” and the shadowy, the mysterious “Remember me when the time comes.” Unlike most parents on their street, the Quales did not beat their children, but they kept saying they ought to, and that the kids were asking for it. Any day now Mrs. Quale would take the broom to them and Mr. Quale start swinging the buckle end of his belt. Leo believed it might happen, though he could have knocked his father down with a shove; Lily, who was intelligent, did not.

Mr. Mitchell Coleman, elected by my aunt to be an example for me, had to resign from the prep school in Montreal where he taught English and art. She passed on the news in a cluster of baffling remarks: it was a great shock to his friends, he had betrayed a trust, he had to live with his conscience, only God could judge, and he would never set foot here again.

I thought he had pilfered something. It was the worst I could imagine as adult bad behavior. My aunt had a friend
who borrowed small objects. (We never said “stole.”) Her husband would go through her handbag at night and find an ivory carving, a butter knife, a china soap dish. I was not expected to have opinions about grown people. Once, I had imitated Mr. Coleman’s way of standing in front of a bookcase, reading titles in an undertone, and my aunt had reproached me for mocking a man of moral worth, whose very friendship confirmed our own decency. Now she was in a close predicament, needing to let me know he had fallen and at once describing and concealing the nature of the fall.

Dilemmas of upbringing were often referred to my father, whose delayed seaborne answer was likely to be “Have it out with him.” Having it out terrified her. She gave me a glass of ginger ale and three squares of cocoa fudge on a bread plate and made me sit down in the parlor, facing her but at a distance. I ate the fudge, then the crumbs. Meanwhile she said that Mr. Coleman’s badness was an example of reality. Until now, “reality” had meant having no money. In her way she was as deft at dealing out a bleak future as any parent across the river. Poverty and high principle seemed to occupy the same terrain—to my mind, a vacant lot. I knew some of the discourse by heart: my father was unlikely to amass any capital out in China; one day I might have nothing to fall back on but a clean reputation. Better to run out of worldly goods than the world’s good opinion, she said, never having been faced with the choice.

What was she trying to tell me? She knew, but wished she had a man there to take over the notes and deliver the lecture. It was for my benefit that she invited so many inspirational male figures to meals. Her generation of women attached no secondary meaning to “confirmed bachelor” or “not the marrying kind.” Some men got along without a wife. English novels were full of them. Occasionally one of those bluff and taciturn heroes got tired of eating cold suppers and let himself be overtaken by a fresh-faced, no-nonsense country girl.
That was fiction: in the real world homosexuality was a criminal offense, liable to a sentence in a penitentiary. For that reason, scores of thoroughly unmarriageable men had to let themselves be seen as a catch, without getting caught. My aunt was a social godsend, for she was attractive and kind, a widow who did not want to remarry (“Steven wouldn’t like it”), and, apparently, bleached of desire. At least, she sent none of those coded messages over the female telegraph, meant to be deciphered only by selected men. Or, perhaps she sent explicit signals and was puzzled because no answer came. Or, owing to the amazing boundlessness of ambiguity, may have received more replies than anyone guessed.

At the time I am telling about, she was calm and cheerful, wore her glossy hair parted in the middle, had a supply of single acquaintances described as brainy, therefore harmless, masculine by denomination and ego, willing to take the train or drive down from Montreal, receive one glass of dark sherry, eat a well-done roast and Yorkshire pudding, and put up with me.

Boyd McAllister arrived in a roadster that had the shine and color of a new chestnut. I climbed into the rumble seat, by way of a step the size of a piano pedal, and he took me for a spin along the river. My aunt shamed me by calling, “Don’t fall in!” Ray Archer turned up slightly drunk, wearing a kilt, and got just his food: no sherry. Later, my aunt said he had no right to a clan tartan, not even on his mother’s side. Herbie Dunn, just back from London, had seen Jack Buchanan singing and dancing, wearing a top hat. He gave my aunt a Buchanan record, “I’m in a Dancing Mood.” We played it on the gramophone and he showed us some steps.

“Now, Steven, watch Mr. Dunn,” my aunt said, as if this, too, were part of a virile education.

But the pleasures of adults are unbecoming. I looked out the parlor window, to the road and the river. More people walked than drove. There were French-Canadian boys dressed for Sunday, stiff and buttoned-up, and a few Anglos throwing
sticks for their dogs. The English had on comfortable weekend clothes. To the French, they looked like hand-me-downs. “If you didn’t know who they were, you’d hand them a nickel,” our farmer neighbor once said. The river was the color of thin maple syrup. On the far side, in a spread of bungalows, was my Protestant school and the deep Catholic mystery of Lily and Leo.

In those days people owned just a few clothes, no more than they needed. A garment was part of one’s singularity. Our teachers put on the same things day after day—the same dress, the same shoes, the same crumpled suit. Leo
was
his plaid shirt and navy-blue sweater, Lily her red coat and knitted leggings. She pulled the leggings off when she got to school, revealing white cotton stockings, and draped them over the radiator, along with other snowy outfits. We were four grades to a room; the smell of the class was of wool drying. Whenever Lily tore her white stockings or got them dirty her crazy mother would scream, “I’ll whip you, Lily Quale, I swear to God!,” but Lily took no notice.

Mitchell Coleman came to Sunday dinner in blazer and flannels, a white shirt, and a striped tie, gray and maroon. He probably had been cautioned from childhood to be neat and clean, even where it didn’t show, in case he got knocked down by a streetcar and had to be carried to the Royal Victoria Hospital and undressed by strangers. With his exactly combed sandy hair, his jacket and trousers uncreased even after a train ride, he was ready for every kind of accident except the one he ran into.

I make him sound set and congealed, but he was in his early twenties, a local poet of the schoolmaster breed. He offered my aunt stapled, mimeographed editions of his work—long spans of verse in which Canada sprawled forbiddingly (nothing enticing about the national posture) between two bleak alternatives, the United States and the frozen North. I realize now that he was an early nationalist, a term that
would have been as meaningless to my aunt as “reality” was to me. Her Canada was a satellite planet, reflecting the fire of English wars, English kings and queens, English habits and ways. My uncle had been killed at Ypres. The men she summoned to dinner matched in age the young officer in the sepia photograph in her bedroom.

Alone with me, in mock after-dinner conversation, Mr. Coleman looked elderly and oppressive. My aunt would leave us so that he could tell me about ideals heritable by men—apparently a richer legacy than any endowed on women. I could hear her in the dining room, clearing the table. She would not come to my rescue until it was time for Mr. Coleman to catch a train back to Montreal. He lived in a two-room apartment in the basement of a stone house on Bishop Street. His windows were just under the ceiling: looking up, he could watch the boots and shoes of strangers going by. It cost him twenty-two dollars a month, which my aunt said was high. That was all we knew about his private arrangements.

The instant she left the room he would stand up, facing the bookcase, with his back to me.

“Read Dickens?”

“Aunt Elspeth reads ‘A Christmas Carol.’ ”

“Aloud, at Christmas?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Read Kipling?”

“When we have to.”

“At school?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You’ve read the Henty books, I suppose?”

“We’ve got some that used to belong to my uncle.”

“Good. They’re good stuff. Read any poetry?”

“When we have to.”

“What do they make you read? British? American? Any Canadian?”

“I wouldn’t know, sir.”

He told my aunt that bringing civilization to children was like throwing rose petals at a moving target.

“Some of the petals stick,” she said. “I’m sure some do.” She looked at me, as if wishing I would stop dodging.

If optimism is the prime requirement for teaching, she was a born educator. Mr. Coleman seemed to attract defeat and may have been in the wrong line altogether, on several counts. For one thing, whatever the scope of his personal adventures, he absolutely hated small boys. But when my aunt unfolded his disgrace, or thought she had, small boys were on her mind. She wanted to know if he had ever made a clear, coarse suggestion while standing in her parlor, reeling off names of authors. I did not know what she was getting at, and was merely thankful to hear he was never coming back. Her assurance that his failure was God’s business meant that one more fragment of disorder had been added to the mess in Heaven.

“It may be for the best that it has come to light,” she said, encouraging me to speak up. It was her second attempt, after the dead try over cocoa fudge. This time I was pushing a lawnmower around the backyard, earning my allowance. She sat on the back step, on a straw cushion usually kept in the hammock.

“Are you just as glad?”

“What about?”

“About not having to see Mitchell Coleman anymore.”

I was just as glad, which condemned him. On his last visit he had sneered at her taste in books.

“She’s reading Depression novels,” he had said. “And now this thing.” He pulled it off the shelf. “ ‘The Case of Sergeant Grischa.’ Not a lady’s book. I’d like to know how it got here, right next to”—he paused to make certain—“ ‘To the Lighthouse.’ ”

“Leo Quale read it,” I said. “He says it’s the best book anybody ever wrote.”

“Do you know what it’s about?”

“Yes. He told me. They shoot him.”