Montreal Stories (16 page)

My father’s death had been kept from me. I did not know its exact circumstances or even the date. He died when I was ten. At thirteen I was still expected to believe a fable about his being in England. I kept waiting for him to send for me, for my life was deeply wretched and I took it for granted he knew. Finally I began to suspect that death and silence can be one. How to be sure? Head-on questions got me nowhere. I had to create a situation in which some adult (not my mother, who was far too sharp) would lose all restraint and hurl the truth at me. It was easy: I was an artist at this. What I had not foreseen was the verbal violence of the scene or the effect it might have. The storm that seemed to break in my head, my need to maintain the pose of indifference (“What are you telling me that for? What makes you think I care?”) were such a strain that I had physical reactions, like stigmata, which doctors would hopelessly treat on and off for years and which vanished when I became independent. The other change was that if anyone asked about my father I said, “Oh, he died.” Now, in Montreal, I could confront the free adult
world of falsehood and evasion on an equal footing; they would be forced to talk to me as they did to each other. Making appointments to meet my father’s friends—Mr. Archie McEwen, Mr. Stephen Ross-Colby, Mr. Quentin Keller—I left my adult name, “Miss Muir.” These were the men who eight, nine, ten years ago had asked, “Do you like your school?”—not knowing what else to say to children. I had curtsied to them and said, “Good night.” I think what I wanted was special information about despair, but I should have known that would be taboo in a place where “like” and “don’t like” were heavy emotional statements.

Archie McEwen, my father’s best friend, or the man I mistook for that, kept me standing in his office on St. James Street West, he standing too, with his hands behind his back, and he said the following—not reconstructed or approximate but recalled, like “The religions of ancient Greece and Rome are extinct” or “O come, let us sing unto the Lord”:

“Of course, Angus was a very sick man. I saw him walking along Sherbrooke Street. He must have just come out of hospital. He couldn’t walk upright. He was using a stick. Inching along. His hair had turned gray. Nobody knew where Charlotte had got to, and we’d heard you were dead. He obviously wasn’t long for this world either. He had too many troubles for any one man. I crossed the street because I didn’t have the heart to shake hands with him. I felt terrible.”

Savage? Reasonable? You can’t tell, with those minds. Some recent threat had scared them. The Depression was too close, just at their heels. Archie McEwen did not ask where I was staying or where I had been for the last eight years; in fact, he asked only two questions. In response to the first I said, “She is married.”

There came a gleam of interest—distant, amused: “So she decided to marry him, did she?”

My mother was highly visible; she had no secrets except unexpected ones. My father had nothing but. When he asked,
“Would you like to spend a year in England with your Aunt Dorothy?” I had no idea what he meant and I still don’t. His only brother, Thomas, who was killed in 1918, had not been married; he’d had no sisters, that anyone knew. Those English mysteries used to be common. People came out to Canada because they did not want to think about the Thomases and Dorothys anymore. Angus was a solemn man, not much of a smiler. My mother, on the other hand—I won’t begin to describe her; it would never end—smiled, talked, charmed anyone she didn’t happen to be related to, swam in scandal like a partisan among the people. She made herself the central figure in loud, spectacular dramas which she played with the houselights on; you could see the audience too. That was her mistake; they kept their reactions, like their lovemaking, in the dark. You can imagine what she must have been in this world where everything was hushed, muffled, disguised: She must have seemed all they had by way of excitement, give or take a few elections and wars. It sounds like a story about the old and stale, but she and my father had been quite young eight and ten years before. The dying man creeping along Sherbrooke Street was thirty-two. First it was light chatter, then darker gossip, and then it went too far [
he
was ill and he couldn’t hide it;
she
had a lover and didn’t try); then suddenly it became tragic, and open tragedy was disallowed. And so Mr. Archie McEwen could stand in his office and without a trace of feeling on his narrow Lowland face—not unlike my father’s in shape—he could say, “I crossed the street.”

Stephen Ross-Colby, a bachelor, my father’s painter chum: The smell of his studio on St. Mark Street was the smell of a personal myth. I said timidly, “Do you happen to have anything of his—a drawing or anything?” I was humble because I was on a private, personal terrain of vocation that made me shy even of the dead.

He said, “No, nothing. You could ask around. She junked a
lot of his stuff and he junked the rest when he thought he wouldn’t survive. You might try …” He gave me a name or two. “It was all small stuff,” said Ross-Colby. “He didn’t do anything big.” He hurried me out of the studio for a cup of coffee in a crowded place—the Honey Dew on St. Catherine Street, it must have been. Perhaps in the privacy of his studio I might have heard him thinking. Years after that he would try to call me “Lynn,” which I never was, and himself “Steve.” He’d come into his own as an artist by then, selling wash drawings of Canadian war graves, sun-splashed, wisteria mauve, lime green, with drifts of blossom across the name of the regiment; gained a reputation among the heartbroken women who bought these impersonations, had them framed—the only picture in the house. He painted the war memorial at Caen. (“Their name liveth forever.”) His stones weren’t stones but mauve bubbles—that is all I have against them. They floated off the page. My objection wasn’t to “He didn’t do anything big” but to Ross-Colby’s way of turning the dead into thistledown. He said, much later, of that meeting, “I felt like a bastard, but I was broke, and I was afraid you’d put the bite on me.”

Let me distribute demerits equally and tell about my father’s literary Jewish friend, Mr. Quentin Keller. He was older than the others, perhaps by some twelve years. He had a whispery voice and a long pale face and a daughter older than I. “Bossy Wendy” I used to call her when, forced by her parents as I was by mine, Bossy Wendy had to take a whole afternoon of me. She had a room full of extraordinary toys, a miniature kitchen in which everything worked, of which all I recall her saying is “Don’t touch.” Wendy Keller had left Smith after her freshman year to marry the elder son of a Danish baron. Her father said to me, “There is only one thing you need to know and that is that your father was a gentleman.”

Jackass
was what I thought. Yes, Mr. Quentin Keller was a jackass. But he was a literary one, for he had once written a
play called
Forbearance
, in which I’d had a role. I had bounded across the stage like a tennis ball, into the arms of a young woman dressed up like an old one, and cried my one line: “Here I am, Granny!” Of course, he did not make his living fiddling about with amateur theatricals; thanks to our meeting I had a good look at the inside of a conservative architect’s private office—that was about all it brought me.

What were they so afraid of, I wondered. I had not yet seen that I was in a false position where they were concerned; being “Miss Muir” had not made equals of us but lent distance. I thought they had read my true passport, the invisible one we all carry, but I had neither the wealth nor the influence a provincial society requires to make a passport valid. My credentials were lopsided: The important half of the scales was still in the air. I needed enormous collateral security—fame, an alliance with a powerful family, the power of money itself. I remember how Archie McEwen, trying to place me in some sensible context, to give me a voucher so he could take me home and show me to his wife, perhaps, asked his second question: “Who inherited the—?”

“The what, Mr. McEwen?”

He had not, of course, read “Why I Am a Socialist.” I did not believe in inherited property. “Who inherited the—?” would not cross my mind again for another ten years, and then it would be a drawer quickly opened and shut before demons could escape. To all three men the last eight years were like minutes; to me they had been several lives. Some of my confidence left me then. It came down to “Next time I’ll know better,” but would that be enough? I had been buffeted until now by other people’s moods, principles, whims, tantrums; I had survived, but perhaps I had failed to grow some outer skin it was now too late to acquire. Olivia thought that; she was the only one. Olivia knew more about the limits of nerve than I did. Her knowledge came out of the clean, swept, orderly poverty that used to be tucked away in
the corners of cities. It didn’t spill out then, or give anyone a bad conscience. Nobody took its picture. Anyway, Olivia would not have sat for such a portrait. The fringed green rug she put over her treadle sewing machine was part of a personal fortune. On her mantelpiece stood a copper statuette of Voltaire in an armchair. It must have come down to her from some robustly anticlerical ancestor. “Who is he?” she said to me. “You’ve been to school in a foreign country.” “A governor of New France,” I replied. She knew Voltaire was the name of a bad man and she’d have thrown the figurine out, and it would have made one treasure less in the house. Olivia’s maiden name was Ouvrardville, which was good in Quebec, but only really good if you were one of the rich ones. Because of her maiden name she did not want anyone ever to know she had worked for a family; she impressed this on me delicately—it was like trying to understand what a dragonfly wanted to tell. In the old days she had gone home every weekend, taking me with her if my parents felt my company was going to make Sunday a very long day. Now I understood what the weekends were about: Her daughters, Berthe and Marguerite, for whose sake she worked, were home from their convent schools Saturday and Sunday and had to be chaperoned. Her relatives pretended not to notice that Olivia was poor or even that she was widowed, for which she seemed grateful. The result of all this elegant sham was that Olivia did not say, “I was afraid you’d put the bite on me,” or keep me standing. She dried her tears and asked if there was a trunk to follow. No? She made a pot of tea and spread a starched cloth on the kitchen table and we sat down to a breakfast of toast and honey. The honey tin was a ten-pounder decorated with bees the size of hornets. Lifting it for her, I remarked, “C’est
collant
,” a word out of a frozen language that started to thaw when Olivia said, “
Tu vis?
”

On the advice of her confessor, who was to be my rival from now on, Olivia refused to tell me whatever she guessed
or knew, and she was far too dignified to hint. Putting together the three men’s woolly stories, I arrived at something about tuberculosis of the spine and a butchery of an operation. He started back to England to die there but either changed his mind or was too ill to begin the journey; at Quebec City, where he was to have taken ship, he shot himself in a public park at five o’clock in the morning. That was one version; another was that he died at sea and the gun was found in his luggage. The revolver figured in all three accounts. It was an officer’s weapon from the Kaiser’s war, that had belonged to his brother. Angus kept it at the back of a small drawer in the tall chest used for men’s clothes and known in Canada as a highboy. In front of the revolver was a pigskin stud box and a pile of ironed handkerchiefs. Just describing that drawer dates it. How I happen to know the revolver was loaded and how I learned never to point a gun even in play is another story. I can tell you that I never again in my life looked inside a drawer that did not belong to me.

I know a woman whose father died, she thinks, in a concentration camp. Or was he shot in a schoolyard? Or hanged and thrown in a ditch? Were the ashes that arrived from some eastern plain his or another prisoner’s? She invents different deaths. Her inventions have become her conversation at dinner parties. She takes on a child’s voice and says, “My father died at Buchenwald.” She chooses and rejects elements of the last act; one avoids mentioning death, shooting, capital punishment, cremation, deportation, even fathers. Her inventions are not thought neurotic or exhibitionist but something sanctioned by history. Peacetime casualties are not like that. They are lightning bolts out of a sunny sky that strike only one house. All around the ashy ruin lilacs blossom, leaves gleam. Speculation in public about the disaster would be indecent. Nothing remains but a silent, recurring puzzlement
to the survivors: Why here and not there? Why this and not that? Before July was out I had settled his fate in my mind and I never varied: I thought he had died of homesickness; sickness for England was the consumption, the gun, the everything. “Everything” had to take it all in, for people in Canada then did not speak of irrational endings to life, and newspapers did not print that kind of news: This was because of the spiritual tragedy for Catholic families, and because the act had long been considered a criminal one in British law. If Catholic feelings were spared it gave the impression no one but Protestants ever went over the edge, which was unfair; and so the possibility was eliminated, and people came to a natural end in a running car in a closed garage, hanging from a rafter in the barn, in an icy lake with a canoe left to drift empty. Once I had made up my mind, the whole story somehow became none of my business: I had looked in a drawer that did not belong to me. More, if I was to live my own life I had to let go. I wrote in my journal that “they” had got him but would not get me, and after that there was scarcely ever a mention.

My dream past evaporated. Montreal, in memory, was a leafy citadel where I knew every tree. In reality I recognized nearly nothing and had to start from scratch. Sherbrooke Street had been the dream street, pure white. It was the avenue poor Angus descended leaning on a walking stick. It was a moat I was not allowed to cross alone; it was lined with gigantic spreading trees through which light fell like a rain of coins. One day, standing at a corner, waiting for the light to change, I understood that the Sherbrooke Street of my exile—my Mecca, my Jerusalem—was this. It had to be: There could not be two. It was
only
this. The limitless green where in a perpetual spring I had been taken to play was the campus of McGill University. A house, whose beauty had brought tears to my sleep, to which in sleep I’d returned to find it inhabited by ugly strangers, gypsies, was a narrow stone thing
with a shop on the ground floor and offices above—if that was it, for there were several like it. Through the bare panes of what might have been the sitting room, with its deep private window seats, I saw neon strip-lighting along a ceiling. Reality, as always, was narrow and dull. And yet what dramatic things had taken place on this very corner: Once Satan had approached me—furry dark skin, claws, red eyes, the lot. He urged me to cross the street and I did, in front of a car that braked in time. I explained, “The Devil told me to.” I had no idea until then that my parents did not believe what I was taught in my convent school. (Satan is not bilingual, by the way; he speaks Quebec French.) My parents had no God and therefore no Fallen Angel. I was scolded for lying, which was a thing my father detested, and which my mother regularly did but never forgave in others.