Watch that Ends the Night

by Hugh Maclennan

  “I can’t wait to see it. Were there any phone calls?”

  “All day long the phone has been beautifully behaved. It didn’t let out a single peep.”

  I was going to hang up when she suddenly called: “Oh yes, one thing more – Sally just telephoned to say she’s changed her mind about staying out for supper, so if you look around the hall you’ll probably find her there and you can walk home together.”

  Outside in the hall students were coming and going, standing in small clusters in front of the notice boards or sitting on benches talking together. It was perfectly normal and I had become such a creature of habit that I had to prod myself and repeat that Jerome was alive and back. I wanted to walk home in that quiet winter evening looking at the evening star at the end of Sherbrooke Street, I wanted my quiet drink and supper with Catherine and to see her new picture and to listen to her new record, and then to do a little home work and sleep in the silent city as I had done all winter long. I wanted no crisis. For years now Catherine and Sally and I had lived knowing that at any instant Catherine might collapse with her face twisting up and her insides writhing and that I would have to rush to the phone for the doctor, then the ambulance would come and there would be the pain, misery and shame of a fearful illness, and possibly even death. I wanted no external crisis to disturb the calm spells.

  Sally was sitting on a deal table in the hall with a huge youth beside her and the pair of them were swinging their legs. The boy, as was obvious from their mutual expressions, was teasing her about something and she was liking it and pretending not to. I recognized him, for several times she had brought him around to the apartment. His name was Alan Royce and I knew he was popular on the campus, if not a big wheel at least a sizable one. When they saw me they both got off the table and I noticed that Sally’s neat little head did not even reach the shoulder of this huge bear of a boy. He brushed a loose lock off his forehead, gave a hitch to a shapeless garment he had probably bought in some place which sold surplus navy stores, and grinned.

  “Hi, sir,” he said.

  “Hi.”

  “You’ve arrived at precisely the right moment,” Sally informed me. “Alan and I were about to quarrel.”

  “What about? The usual thing?”

  “I told her about the bees and the birds long ago, sir.”

  “You told me!” she said. “And since when have you known the elements of biology?”

  He gave her an amiable slap on the backside and we stepped outside and there from the front of the Arts Building was downtown Montreal like a feet at anchor in an arctic port with all its lights on and the smoke going straight up. The campus was dark with its elm fountains lean and bare, but long rhomboids of light from the library windows fell across the snow and I saw students passing through them with their breath puffing out and heard their heels creaking on the packed snow. This campus was an island of quiet in the city’s roar, and at night it was an island of dark in the city’s blaze, and on this particular night it felt very cold. I buttoned up the collar of my station wagon coat and pulled my fur cap down over my ears and forehead, and Alan Royce, who was bareheaded and rosy-cheeked, gave me another of his grins.

  “Sir, you look like a pall bearer at a Soviet funeral.”

  “I feel like one.”

  A heavy step crunched behind me and I turned and saw Roberts, the former Grenadier who had become the college porter.

  “Did you get my message, sir?”

  “Thanks, I got it.”

  He sniffed noisily and contemplated the scene. “Ten below it is at present and twenty below before dawn. ‘ard to believe the glaciers are melting on a night like this, isn’t it, sir?”

  “Are they melting?”

  “Oh yes, sir, indeed they are. The other day I’eard Professor Chown explaining to a foreign gentleman that the glaciers are on the melt. Professor Chown is a world-renowned authority on glaciers.”

  “Well, well.”

  We said good-night all around, and while Sally and I went down the campus avenue, Alan Royce turned off toward his fraternity house on University Street to the left of the campus. The porter stayed where he was, hands locked behind his back, waxed moustaches bristling, shoulders on parade with his breath puffing out. It was exciting on the campus with the sound of creaking feet as the students hurried past clamping their ears; there was the recurrent excitement an extremely cold night gives you even in Canada. The evening star was yellow in a tiny green corona caught in a net of bare branches over the little observatory and behind us, high over the university and the hospitals that hug the city’s crest, the hospitals I had come to know so well, Mount Royal slumped like a stationary whale in an arctic sea, the huge lighted cross in its brow blazing eastward toward the Catholic end of the city.

  “You’re exceptionally taciturn tonight,” Sally told me.

  “Considering what you think about my talking too much, nothing could please me more than to hear you say that.”

  “All I meant was that when you talk too much it’s because you do it compulsively.”

  “Sally darling, I love you.”

  “Now you’re teasing me.”

  Sherbrooke Street throbbed with its usual traffic jam and the cars and buses were stalled solid all the way from University Street to Côte des Neiges with a fume of exhaust hanging over them in the still air and their windows so frosted it was impossible to see through them. Horns were snarling impotently.

  “I wish you liked Alan Royce,” Sally said, and from her guarded tone I knew it mattered to her that I should.

  “What gives you the idea that I don’t?”

  “You think he’s dumb.”

  “I hardly know the lad.”

  “I know he’s indecently gigantic and wears his hair like an oaf, but he happens to be one of the most intelligent people I’ve ever met. He’s another product of divorced parents, but the marvelous thing about him is that he’s not one of the sad young men. I suppose you know his awful family?”

  “I’ve a vague idea who they are. What’s his father do?”

  “Investments, I suppose. Alan and I met him once in the Ritz and he took us to lunch. He reminded me of one of those leathery officer types you see in the British liquor ads – you know, very distinguished and all that, but distinctly B-minus. During lunch he told us how good his squash game was and how soft our generation is and he asked me to feel his abdominal muscles. ‘They’re as hard now as they were when I was twenty-one,’ he said, as if I cared how hard his stomach was. Alan calls him the sexual career man.”

  “You’re giving this boy a terrific build-up.”

  “I am, as a matter of fact. In spite of that awful family, I’ve been trying to tell you that Alan is not one of the sad young men. And he’s got this terrific intelligence if only he’d use it. His mother is pleasant enough, but she’s absolutely helpless and clinging, and now she’s living in Ottawa married to a civil servant who’s a Jew. His name is Lubliner and I suppose you know him, for you know everybody in Ottawa.”

  “If he’s Jack Lubliner, I do know him and he is nice.”

  “Alan’s got everything under control now, but in the crucial years that turn people into neurotics he had a pretty bad time. He’s come right out of it. Perhaps I shouldn’t mention this, but he told his father once he didn’t think he was his real father.”

  I trudged along with my face feeling as though a thousand needles of ice were massaging it.

  “You know, Sally, Alan was by no means the first youth to make that suggestion to a perfectly legitimate parent.”

  “Please don’t depreciate him and tear him down, George.”

  “Darling, I can’t afford to tear anybody down.”

  There was another burst of horn blowing from the packed automobiles and Sherbrooke Street looked like an army in retirement. I lost interest in Alan Royce and barely listened while Sally explained his latest theory about the effect of the somatotype on the human character. I was thinking of Jerome and
Catherine and what I would say to Catherine after dinner, and I was wishing I could afford to say nothing.

  “Alan thinks I’m somewhat mixed up,” Sally was saying, “and he insists I ought to talk my background out of my system. He says that’s the only thing to do if you’re the product of a broken family. What we were really talking about when you came along, in case you’re interested, was Dad.”

  I started. “I thought you said you were getting into a fight?”

  “That was just covering up in front of you. I was shy.”

  “I see.”

  We stopped at an intersection and waited while a few cars nudged their way into the traffic jam, the light changed and we crossed.

  “Alan thinks each period of history favors the emergence of a special human type,” Sally told me. “And that made me think of something I’d never thought of before. The depression was Dad’s real time, wasn’t it? I mean, he was a real depression type – wasn’t he?”

  “What about me? I’m a depression type and I was never like him.”

  “Oh, you’re just old George. What I meant about Dad was that he really fitted in and symbolised that whole awful period. Those appalling adolescent he-men like Hemingway and all those naive idealists thinking they were so terrific because they went to bed with each other to prove the capitalist system stank. That’s what I meant.”

  “Is this Alan’s diagnosis, or yours?”

  “His, mainly. But I think he’s right. Don’t you?”

  We were passing under a light and I saw her face like a cameo under the scarf she wore over her hair. She walked and stood as straight as a rush, and when she was on her feet you never thought of her as short. Sally resembled neither of her parents, though she had Catherine’s fair skin and a good deal of Jerome’s vitality and impatience. I knew she was sensitive about the shape of her jaw, which was rather long, for a week ago she had asked me if she would look like a horse when she was my age. But she was not alarmed about the prospect, for this winter she had been having too wonderful a time. To her surprise she had become one of the most popular girls on the campus, and our apartment would have pullulated with youths if Catherine had been well enough to receive them.

  “Just how well do you remember your father, Sally?”

  “Too well.”

  “He was very fond of you, you know.”

  “Is that why he walked out and left us?”

  Suddenly I found myself on Jerome’s side against this girl I loved, this member of the generation I liked so much better than my own.

  “Your father didn’t just walk out,” I said. “He went to the war.”

  “Before it began?”

  “That particular war began long before Mr. Chamberlain got around to declaring it.”

  “I wonder if it did? Alan says it was the death-wish that produced men like my father. The war too for that matter.”

  We trudged on, slipping on icy patches, passing clusters of office girls shivering at the bus stops, passing an art gallery with a minor Dutch master ruby-red in its window.

  “Among other things, Sally, your father was a great doctor.”

  “Come, George! ‘Great’ is a big, big word.”

  “I admit he wasn’t a Penfield, but he was a very good doctor and he was a very brave man.”

  “Couldn’t a man be brave in your day without making a career out of it?”

  The traffic crawled twenty yards closer to Côte des Neiges, the horns wailed when it stopped again, and through a momentary gap I saw, a jet of pure excitement in the night, a slim woman dart out of the Ritz with her mink a-flutter and one hand trailing a graceful adieu to an iron-gray, European-looking man bare-headed in front of the revolving door.

  “When your father went away you were only eight,” I said, “but you can’t possibly remember what things were like then. None of you kids can. Hitler was around then. Call people like your father anything you like, but if there had been no people to walk out to the horns, Hitler would be around still.”

  We passed the Museum, a church, and then in front of another church we found ourselves on the comer of Simpson Street with the light against us and a snarl of traffic blocking our way.

  “What I remember about Dad,” she said, “isn’t what he felt about Hitler, but how he made Mummy cry. I remember it so well sometimes I can’t sleep. And I was talking to Alan about it and he said, ‘What do you expect? All our parents were balled up about themselves.’ But Mummy wasn’t, and you know she wasn’t. He made her that way that time.”

  A taxi trying to muscle its way into the mainstream had hooked its bumper onto a Cadillac, and now the taxi driver and the chauffeur of the Cadillac were out in the cold arguing, and a cop was looking at them unable to get through to put in his two cents’ worth. The jam at this corner would be solid for another ten minutes.

  “Let’s climb through,” I said.

  We did so, and just as we were about to turn up Côte des Neiges hill, Sally stopped and faced me.

  “Why do you stand up for him?” she said. “Once before I talked about him and you did the same thing.”

  “Because I admired him. Because he did a great deal for me once. Because he was brave and I wasn’t.”

  It was strange having such a conversation on the corner of Côte des Neiges and Sherbrooke in the cold with the traffic snarling beside us. Strangest of all was the fact that Sally, just after I had been talking with Jerome, should have begun to speak of her father. Or was it really as strange as I fancied? Underneath her banter she had been disturbed lately and in one way or another she had been asking me questions about the 1930s. I had not realized that her motive had been to lead me on to talk of Jerome. “Who am I? Whence come I?” Of course, I thought, the child has fallen in love, but she is not a romantic, she has a scientific mind and she wants to know the answers. And possibly something else: possibly she is frightened of herself, of feelings in herself she cannot control, and so she wants to talk about her father.

  “George,” she said, “please don’t laugh. If you do I’ll never speak to you again. But there’s something I want to say. I’ve wanted to say it for years but it seemed – I don’t know, but I just couldn’t. George?”

  “Yes, Sally?”

  “I wish you were my real father and not him. I think of you as my real father.”

  Coming on top of everything else that day, this was too much. It was the nicest thing anyone had ever said to me and tears scalded my eyes before they turned to icy liquid. I put out my gloved hand and brushed her cheek.

  “Thank you, child,” I said, and we began walking up the hill.

  The headlights cascading down Côte des Neiges were like two rivers of light and it was so cold the whole north seemed to be breathing quietly into my face. This air had come down from the empty far north of spruce and frozen lakes where there were no people, it had come down from the germless, sinless land. Winter days like this were hard on Catherine, each year they were harder, but I could not help enjoying them, for they reminded me of my youth and of the time before the glaciers began to melt.

  “Sally –” I began, and stopped.

  For suddenly I was frightened by an entirely new element in this bizarre situation in which I found myself: I was frightened by what Sally might do to her father when she met him. She would be polite and competent in the situation, for she was a polite, competent girl except on certain occasions with me and her boy friends. But when she met her father I was afraid she might wither him with hostility or even with something worse, which I imagined might be the terrible indifference the young can show to their elders. What had happened to Jerome I could not even guess. What he was like now was probably something I could not even imagine. But he had always been a man who lived passionately because that was the only way he had been able to function. He had not been raised in a city apartment like this girl, and if he had survived the camps of the Nazis and Russians it could only have been because of that passionate, rash and irrefragable strengt
h I recalled in him. He was not wise; he was not shrewd; he was not even clever; he had never learned or been taught how to adjust.

  “Transferences aren’t really so difficult,” I heard Sally say.

  “Freud and you little girls.”

  “Oh, we take him in our stride.”

  “You take so much in your stride.”

  CHAPTER IV

  I don’t know how a man can describe his wife to somebody else unless he dislikes her – there is nothing like dislike to make a character appear vivid – but the very things in a woman that makes a man love her escape language. Women seem able to recognize with perfect candor the flaws in the men they love. Men lack this ability. And besides I had known Catherine so long and in so many circumstances that I could describe half a dozen entirely different women and they would all be her to me.

  Now in the living room with a glass of whisky in my hand, feeling the coldness of the glass and the warmth of whisky along my veins, I watched Catherine and Sally preparing the table for supper. How lucky I had been, I thought, to have lived with two women like these. They were quiet with each other as they always were when doing something together about the house. They were unusually close for mother and daughter. Yet they were so different it was hard to believe they were even related.

  Sally was rush-straight, quick and impetuous, with crisp, blonde curled hair and she looked at ease in her undergraduate’s sweater and tweed skirt. Catherine had never looked well in tweeds or woolens. Now in a limegreen housecoat she appeared slow and deliberate, her movements adagio. Her hair had once been sable with a suggestion of lightness of weight, of airiness, and it was still mostly sable despite the suggestion of silver-steel which now was beginning to show. She was shorter than her daughter. She had a small waist and a classically formed figure almost but not quite plump, and the sweep of her shoulders was so bold it made me think of the clarity of a Picasso-line. Her face was heart-shaped, large gray eyes and sensitive mouth. If you could think of a queen as small you could think of Catherine as queen-like.