Montreal Stories (33 page)

I slowed down, stopped, examined a display of garden furniture in a store window. She ran on tiptoe, shuffling, the way women used to run in spike heels; caught up; grabbed me by the sleeve. Part of my mind had fallen into darkness. I could not recall having ever loved her. The Dietrich-like image dissolved, was replaced by one of Ken Peel, in heightened
tones, wearing the trusting smile of the natural con artist. That face was the stamp of his Montreal generation, distributed unevenly among all ranks and classes of English-speaking males, as luck is thinly or thickly spread.

My next immediate feeling was snobbish relief that Peel was nobody’s friend, and the incident could be contained. But then it occurred to me that the people I knew had already come to some conclusion about Lily. A girl who could glide out of the late-afternoon shadows of Peel’s place had the habit of dark doorways.

Her hand rested lightly on my arm. She explained what she was doing on St. Catherine Street—buying a birthday present. (I was about to be twenty-four.) “A new tennis racquet,” she said—the last thing in the world I needed just then.

We went to the movie, and I appraised the nervous, then confident way she held my hand. She must have been saying to herself, “I was wrong. He doesn’t know.” Until today we had read each other’s thoughts. Telepathic marvels, unmatched coincidences fed our conversation. Now the flow of one mind into another seemed to me unhealthy, unwise. I prayed never to stand revealed to anyone again. The film was about a pregnant woman in an Italian village who believes she has been seduced by a messenger from Heaven. Lily had a lapsed Catholic’s glibness on such matters, and did not bother to lower her voice. The cinema was nearly empty, so that her remarks carried. First a woman said, “Would you mind?,” then a man called, “Ah, shut your face!”

We left and walked along to a German restaurant called The Old Mill, and had beer and Wiener schnitzels. The film had reminded Lily of the boarding school, accursed and despised, to which Old Lady Quale had consigned her when she was trying to get Lily away from boys; specifically, from me. I knew most of the stories, but I let her talk. She looked past me, with the soft bright stare that took in everything.

Why didn’t I challenge her? Because she might have lied,
accused me of being jealous, of following her all round the city, always trying to catch her out. She might swear she had never been inside Peel’s store; rather, only once, to inquire about racquets. I had no method, no system, for coming to terms with Lily. My aunt never lied—she had never been frightened—and my parents lived in a barren climate of the truth at any cost. Lily occupied a terrain more lush and changeable, but she had been brought up by dangerous people.

I began to wonder if I could be sure. Perhaps she had been walking by, had happened to glance in the shopwindow, seen the very thing, stepped inside to have a word with Mr. Peel. She was nothing to Peel except Miss L. Quale, secretary to a dentist in the Medical Arts Building. I had to ask myself if I wanted to live with Lily or without her: I had always been with Lily. When I was much younger, had won prizes, had my looks compared to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s, I had studied my face, without vanity, wondering if my overpraised and temperate character held some other essence—more charming, more devious, even weak. In my aunt’s copy of “All the Sad Young Men” I had found an underscored passage about the end of love, the end of April; never the same love twice; “let it pass.” My aunt must have recognized her own stoic yearning for my late uncle, young Lieut. Cope. I knew nothing about him, except for a sepia studio portrait in First World War uniform.

Lily ate three bites of schnitzel. We traded plates, and I finished it off. She drank a sip of beer, pushed the glass across, took my empty one. I was coming out of darkness, ready to listen to her again. She said how much she owed me, how much she had learned from me. Without me, she would never have known about European movies, Anna Magnani, Vittorio De Sica. She might have been like her own mother—ignorant, bigoted, probably mad. I didn’t answer. I think she believed it: I know at the time I thought it was true.

We were married in Christ Church Cathedral, east of where the European cinema and the German restaurant and Peel’s old store used to be. All effaced; never replaced. The Quales would not attend the wedding, because it was in an Anglican church. My parents sent a letter from China and managed to congratulate me without mentioning Lily. (The Maoists were about to send them packing.) My aunt was there, wearing a great many layers of clothing for the tropical day. All that linen and silk must have been a kind of armor. I had wanted Lily to be given a token of family jewelry. It wasn’t exactly the czarist imperial treasure, but a pin or a ring might have made Lily feel welcome and secure. My aunt did not think such a gesture was required or even sensible; she did not expect the marriage to last. For the same reason, she would have preferred a civil ceremony to all these reckless promises to God, but in Quebec only religious rites were allowed. She kissed Lily on the cheek, then suddenly relented, removed the seed-pearl brooch fastened to her jacket, and pinned it on Lily’s dress.

Lily and I sailed to France on a Polish freighter. The Lapwings were already installed in a Mediterranean hovel, on the most decrepit street of an ancient quarter. An open sewer ran under their windows. Lapwing never noticed; he sat indoors, working out a community of purpose between William Morris and St. Paul that so far had escaped academic notice. In a letter to Lily, Edie had described how their neighbors threw garbage out their windows and stoned stray cats and dogs. She was not complaining but felt relieved to be at last confronted with the real world. The Lapwings did not think we were ready for the kind of life that underlies appearances, and so they had leased for us a more conventional dwelling, close to bus routes. There was a view over the sea. It would cost us eight dollars a month. (The Lapwings were paying six.)

On the second day out Lily curled up and was deathly seasick. Then she seemed to be bleeding to death. The ship’s
doctor took me aside and said, “We can call it an accident. Don’t worry. You are young, you can have other children.”

I said, “It’s a mistake.” Lily could not have been pregnant: I had taken the greatest care. I never wanted my aunt to be able to say Lily had trapped me by being cunning and Catholic and fertile. I was not the son of missionaries for nothing: I saw the incident as a clean sweep, the falsehood washed away, the pagan wrenched from old customs, blood sacrifice of the convert—Lily converted to me, entirely.

Though slight of figure, she was very strong. Her health improved quickly. She told me over and again about the life we would have together, and the happiness that would carry us. But I imagined she was thinking, He doesn’t know, and I said to myself, Well, let it pass. In the shack above the sea I heard, “He doesn’t know,” more and more faintly, and Lily must have heard a dying, a fading, a whispering “Let it pass.” She had more sense than any man, so she cut the sound.

W
HEN LILY QUALE
was fourteen, stockings were hard to come by, because we were in a war and factories were dressing soldiers. She colored her bare legs with pancake makeup, some of which always rubbed off on the edge of her skirt. Recently she had taken up with a Polish girl, a few years older, twice expelled from convent schools. She taught Lily how to draw a fake seam with eyebrow pencil and explained a few other matters usually left obscure in Catholic Quebec.

Lily’s mother showed a cold face to the girl who knew such a lot. She didn’t think well of me, either, although I knew hardly anything that might interest Lily.

“You and Lily are too big to be natural company for each other now,” her mother said one Saturday afternoon, when Lily and I were sitting in the Quales’ kitchen, on the excuse of doing homework. I was a year ahead, writing an essay on how railways helped the Industrial Revolution, while Lily tried to disentangle the reasons for the American Civil War. We barely knew that Canada had a history. “She ought to be with a girl her own age,” Mrs. Quale went on, “and you, Steve, you’d be better off with another boy. And I don’t want the two of you going upstairs to study in Leo’s room unless I’m in the house.”

That was how adults saw things then: simply. Catholic-Protestant stories, all bad luck, lay strewn around us, the rocks and bricks of separation. Why let anything go too far between two kids who were bound to separate? The town we
lived in straggled along both sides of the Châtelroux River. There was no core to the place except a huddle of stores around the French church, with its aluminum-painted roof and spire. The Quales were in bungalow territory, Catholic and English-speaking—everyone’s minority. The last thing they looked for was trouble. My aunt had a house on the opposite shore, facing the river. We had a dock and a rowboat and a canoe. We had French-Canadian neighbors, working a strip farm, and English-Canadian acquaintances living in houses like ours, farther down the road, toward the bridge and railway station. We had a wide lawn and an enclosed backyard, and a low hedge of shrubs with red berries, and a covered gallery running around three sides of the house. We did not keep a cat, because my aunt thought cats were hypocrites, and we gave up keeping a dog after Snowy drowned and Rex was poisoned. My parents were Anglican missionaries in China; my Aunt Elspeth was bringing me up.

I knew even then that Mrs. Quale was mistaken about Lily. She could never have wanted a close girlfriend. The Polish chum was just a handbook she studied for expertise. Lily kept a large pond stocked with social possibilities, nearly all boys, and thought nothing of calling me on a Saturday if some other happy chance had let her down. My aunt, hearing my end of the negotiation, would dub me a human jellyfish; but one of the things adults forget is how complete younger people seem to one another, how individual and clearly defined. It is the grown person who looks evasive and blurry, who needs to improvise. Lily to me was without shadow: I took it for granted she worked her arrangements with hook and reel. My easygoing response was more toughly snobbish, and so more injurious to Lily, than my aunt could guess. Probably, I thought well of myself for letting Leo Quale’s little sister get away with murder.

Before that time, when I was still in seventh grade—in those days known as Junior Fourth—my aunt remarked that
it would be good for someone like me, raised by a woman, to have a stalwart figure of some kind to look up to. I thought about Lily, and the scale of her nerve, and how she learned the uses of gall from watching her brother Leo, and I said, “You mean like Leo Quale?”

“Leo has certain qualities,” said my aunt, as if he had barely escaped hanging. “It was more a gentleman I had in mind—say, like Mr. Coleman.”

She was defining a stage of growth as well as a caste. It is true that at fifteen Leo was too advanced to make a friend of me, but he was still too immature to offer paternal advice about sexual prudence and financial restraint. (My aunt actually believed fathers can do this.) She began to think well of him later that year, after running out of other models for me. To my aunt the male nature was expected to combine the qualities of an Anglo-Canadian bank manager and a British war poet, which means to say a dead one. Folded inside the masculine psyche there had to be a bright yearning to suffocate face down in a flooded trench, to bleed from wounds inflicted by England’s enemies, even to be done in by a septic flea bite, if a patriotic case could be made against the flea.

Leo showed that eagerness to perish: enlist, ship overseas, never be heard from again. He was heavy and blond, a kind of Viking, one of the thick ones, out of dark small parents, Glasgow Irish on both sides. It had taken him six years to flounder through his last three grades, and he was now becalmed in eighth. He could read, he could even work complicated sums in his head, but he could not write a complete sentence. My aunt blamed his school, which also happened to be mine: Leo should have had Catholic teachers. All these years he had felt bewildered, unwanted, could not focus his intelligence. A memory of Leo—placid, sleepy, too big for his desk—stands next to my aunt’s appraisal.

After school and all day Saturday he delivered groceries to English customers, on both sides of the river. Sometimes he
made four or five trips along the same street—particularly Fridays, when there was a rush on beer. Quebec was the only part of Canada where beer could be sold by a grocer, instead of in a government liquor store. We owed the privilege to the twists and snarls of Catholic morality, said my aunt, who drank only sherry.

Leo and my aunt were expecting a war, well ahead of world leaders. “Ah, it’ll come, all right,” he would assure her, lowering a box of provisions from his shoulder to the kitchen table. “And we’ll be in it. Don’t you worry, Mrs. Cope. We need a good old war to sort us out.”

“I’m afraid you’re right, Leo. War brings out the best in men and nations, but we have to remember the fallen and the missing, and sometimes there is injustice, too.”