Montreal Stories (35 page)

“Your friend Leo?”

“No, the sergeant. He’s supposed to be a deserter, so they shoot him.”

“Don’t take it to heart. It’s only a story. Most of us die in bed.”

He sounded simpler, easier—too late. My side of the exchange closed down. It was all right with me if we hated each other, as long as my aunt didn’t know.

Better a reticent kid than one suddenly cold. He sensed the change—he was not a teacher for nothing—and began to speak at random, as if we shared the same tastes and the same age: “Arnold Zweig. I wonder if he and that other Zweig are brothers, like the two Manns.” Did he really think I could tell him? “She’s read it, too,” he said, showing me how the book fell open in his hands.

Later on, I discovered it opened to passages that my aunt, or Leo, may have liked in particular. The core of her mind, or Leo’s, contained more anxiety than anyone guessed. One of the two had lingered over the short truth that death means dying. Only someone with great denseness of spirit needs to be reminded, so I suppose the steady reader to have been Leo.

Released from eighth grade, Leo became free to carry groceries full time. He set a box down in our kitchen and made the remark that we seemed to live on cereal. His habit of uttering one pointless thing after the other had my aunt believing he had plenty to say but lacked a sense of direction.

“Your parents must be paying Catholic-school tax, Leo,” she said to him. “Why weren’t you in a Catholic school?”

“You have to take a bus. My sister Lily pukes in buses.”

“There are two Catholic schools here in the town.”

“They’re both French.”

“What of it? It isn’t too late for Lily to change. She could learn French, and she’d be with her own kind. We often see the little Chartrand girls going by, wearing their uniforms. They look so sweet, all in black.”

Leo stared at the demented lady who did not know there were Catholics and Catholics. He made a stab at saner conversation, and asked if this was an old house.

“Fairly old,” said my aunt, smiling. She did not want to make the tenant of a raw bungalow feel ill at ease.

“About a hundred years?”

“Perhaps more.”

“Did you always live here?”

“It was a summer home,” said my aunt. “But when I had Steven—I mean when Steven came to stay with me—I decided to bring him up in a house instead of an apartment.”

“We move a lot,” he said—I think with pride.

The Quales were not rich or poor enough to stay put. They kept packing and unpacking their bedsteads and their chamber pots and the family washtub. Each move was decided for the better, but they still had to pump cold water and cross a backyard to a privy. There was the same glassed-in cube of a veranda around the front door and storm porch at the back. The storm porch, a storage shed made of unpainted planks, was meant for brooms and pails, old newspapers, overshoes, rubber boots, stray scarves and mittens, jam jars without lids, hockey sticks. It was the place where the Quales shed snow from their outdoor clothes and where Leo sat down on a broken chair to take off his skates.

Sometimes when he got up in the morning, Mr. Quale would find a hobo sleeping on the floor, under a strip of carpet. “God alone keeps tramps from freezing to death,” he would say aloud, as he heated the rest of last night’s soup for the man. No one was ever turned away: the magic of retribution could transform any workingman into a vagrant. While the stranger drank his soup, Mr. Quale pretended to
sort newspapers, so he wouldn’t make off with the bowl. If Lily came out, with her nightgown stuffed inside her woollen leggings, and her coat around her shoulders, on her way to the privy, Mr. Quale would order her back to her room until the man had disappeared. Sitting on the edge of her bed, she could hear them exchanging neutral opinions about good and bad times. The only thing Mr. Quale ever offered, other than soup, was a pair of old skates that hung by their tied laces from a rusty nail.

“Can you use these skates?” he would ask.

“I don’t think so. Thanks all the same.”

In every Châtelroux household there were skates that seemed to have arrived on their own, and that no one could wear. Ours were attached to the lock of a shutter. Every so often my aunt unhooked the skates and examined them. “Steven, are you sure they aren’t yours?”

“They’re miles too big.”

“Well, they certainly don’t belong to me.”

“Somebody must have left them behind.”

“I suppose so. I wish he’d come and take them back.”

She tried to fob them off on Leo. He took one look and said, “Gurruls’.”

“Girls’ skates, Leo? Are you sure? Perhaps your mother could try wearing them, or Lily. Lily would have to grow into them, of course.”

“Lily doesn’t wear black skates. Only white.”

Another day, she tried to get him to take home an assortment of piano scores, and seemed astonished to hear the Quales had no piano.

“Why not, Leo? Don’t you like music?”

“My dad likes that Gershwing,” he said, after a pause.

It is the only time I can ever remember my aunt’s seeming foolish to me. She was pink in the face, ready to lead him by the hand through Gershwin to Bach. I bring to mind her flushed forehead and the excitement in the room, tension I was still
too young to be able to measure, generated by the presence of the town dunce, unteachable and dying to go to war. Mr. Coleman had been right about her reading; Leo entered her imagination on the same wave as the Depression. For a while she decided the poor were to be joined, or imitated, rather than tided over. Leo was not offended; he did not know he was poor. The Quales were better off than most of their neighbors.

My aunt began to say that a taste of family life, of the warm, untidy kind that Leo surely enjoyed, might be good for me. She often sent me to the Quales’ house with a grocery list for Leo, when she could as easily have called the store. A sheltered boy had much to learn from a brave, older boy already making his own way, she said; but all I learned, tagging after someone too big and too different, was that I had it in me to resent my aunt. I couldn’t hate her. She wasn’t a mean woman, not even strict by nature. She was trying to make up for the absence of a man’s firm guidance.

Their family life seemed to me fierce and mournful. Between Leo and his mother lay something cold, like cold poison. On one of her dark days I watched Mrs. Quale putting Leo’s plaid shirt through the hand wringer, clamped on the edge of the sink.

“On top of that,” she said, perhaps to herself, not to me, “he had to take his time getting born. Arse first, as if he had all the leisure in the world. In no hurry. Didn’t care about
me
. They said, ‘Come on, Mrs. Q., make an effort, you don’t want him to strangle.’ He was blue in the face, when they finally saw he had a face. Didn’t get oxygen. That’s why. No oxygen. Nurse said, ‘So don’t be surprised if he stays pretty dim from the neck up.’ ”

Pursuing his cultural awakening, my aunt led Leo past the dining room, where he stopped to stare at an engraved portrait of Sir Walter Scott, but before he could ask who it was, and his age, she ushered him through to the parlor, showed him books, and said, “You may borrow anything.”

His hand went straight to “The Case of Sergeant Grischa,” which he may have taken to be a detective story. He kept it, I think, about three months, returned it, then asked to have it again.

Much later, Lily told me about the first time he brought the book to supper and propped it in front of his plate. He had been reading it some five weeks.

“What’re you wasting time on now?” said his mother.

“Let the boy read,” said Mr. Quale. “It’s education.”

Mrs. Quale had nothing against that. She believed in education but was not sure how it was obtained.

“Well, what is it?” said Mr. Quale. “Answer your mother when she speaks to you.”

“Book I borrowed from Mrs. Cope.”

“Take it back,” his father said. “They’ll be saying you stole it.”

“Tell me, Leo,” said Lily. “Tell me what it’s about.” She was so crazy about reading that she read the stuff on calendars. “I’ll read to you, Leo. I’ve finished eating. Do you want me to read to you?”

Lily was the favorite: they didn’t mind letting her read. When she could not pronounce a word, she skipped the whole line. The radio news, tuned to the pitch of Mrs. Quale’s voice when she raised it, ran alongside Lily’s tone, which was soft and unsteady. Mrs. Quale soon grew sick and tired of hearing Lily, and she could not figure out what sort of army the sergeant belonged to. Mr. Quale became impatient, too. He shouted that in his day deserters were stood up and shot, and that was the end of it. They didn’t drag their existence on for dozens of pages. Mrs. Quale said it would do Leo a lot more good if he read to Lily. They did try it that way, several evenings, but he didn’t enjoy it, and for the others he was too slow. He finally finished the book, on his own, and was the only one in the family who knew the deserter was stood up and shot.

Leo had his tonsils and adenoids out and walked home an hour later, bleeding into a towel. His small mother was with him, holding on to his sleeve. The cuts became infected, and he nearly died. When he was said to be out of danger, my aunt made me go and see him. She sent two jars of grape jelly, wrapped in leftover Christmas paper, and a note of encouragement, signed, “(Mrs.) Elizabeth B. Cope.”

My first surprise was that they were humbly glad to see me—the shrimpy parents, and Lily, wearing just her petticoat, her hair all suds. (Rumor had it that Catholics never washed.)

“Get some clothes on you,” her father said. “There’s company.”

Leo was getting royal treatment, propped up in his parents’ double bed with an embroidered pillow stuffed behind his neck. A number of unsorted social facts were shed from my person as I accepted his invitation to sit down at the foot of the bed.

He said, “Well, sport,” in a husky whisper, and moved his legs to allow me more room. I hardly dared look at him—I was not sure how to deal with my advancement to family friend—and stared instead at the pattern of daisies and asters on the pillow case. On a table next to the bed was a white enamel basin with a towel over it. He said they were giving him emetics, so he would throw up the rest of the infection.

“Well, sport,” he said again, meaning, I think, that extra conversation was up to me. The room was dark, ferociously heated by a kerosene stove. A stylized design of birch leaves, or sunflower petals, had been carved in the stove lid, to serve as vents. The heat and brilliance of the flame had turned the stove into a magic lantern: the whole ceiling was covered with ornamentation, hugely magnified, in quivering red and blue. Lily came in and sat down, combing her wet hair. She had buttoned on a gray cardigan belonging to her father,
which fitted her like a coat. She said, “You’re fine, Leo,” because she still thought he might be dying.

Leo changed the position of his feet. I took it for a hint and got straight off the bed. He said, “Come again, sport,” and that rounded off the visit.

In March he put his clothes on, and found that everything he owned was short in the legs and sleeves. He had to duck under the frame doorway between the kitchen and storm porch. He did not return to work at once but did odd jobs around the house, getting his strength back. My aunt had a new delivery boy, Doug Bagshaw. He kept his tips, coppers and nickels, in a baking-powder tin. He liked to weigh the tin in his hand and make the coins jingle. My aunt did not try to draw him out, and never once said he or the Bagshaws might be good for me. When she referred to the old days, before Leo was taken so ill, it was to mention Herbie Dunn and his kind gift of the Jack Buchanan record. She recalled other Buchanan songs—“Two Little Bluebirds” and “A Cup of Coffee, a Sandwich, and You”—which she hummed for me. Buchanan was so tall, and his top hat made him so much taller, that he had trouble finding suitable dance partners. Saying this, she drew herself up, even straighter than before.

“I’m the general, you can be Grischa, the rest of you are soldiers.” That was Lily, marshaling her troops of little girls on the soggy spring lawn. There had been a freeze, then a thaw, then a new fall of spring snow. The game was a mixture of hide-and-seek and tag, with two teams drawn up, as in red rover or run sheep run. Anyone on the wrong side, the army that wasn’t Lily’s, could be shot on sight. “Grischa” was leader of a team, the equivalent of being a general. The victims lay down and got their coats wet.

Leo had been sweeping the front walk. Now he stood leaning on his broom, eating jujubes out of a paper bag. There was
only one other boy, Vince Whitton, aged six. His sister, Beryl, wasn’t allowed to play in the street unless she agreed to take him with her.

Vince said, “One other time, I was over here and some person gave us some jujubes,” but Leo never made a move.

My aunt had sent me across the river after school to find out if Leo was ever going to work for the grocer again; it would be her last show of interest in the Quales. I stood, neither claimed nor discarded, doing nothing in particular, watching Lily in her red coat.

Just then Mr. Quale came along the street and up the walk Leo had cleared of snow. He wore a wool cap and a long gray scarf. He said to Leo, “How do you stand all that jabbering?,” meaning the little girls, excited and shrill.