The fire glowed, Catherine’s pictures loomed on the walls, in a dismal room downtown where hundreds of whores had labored and hundreds of alcoholics had seen snakes, Jerome Martell was either asleep or staring into the darkness. And outside, according to Sally, the temperature was sixteen below zero.
“But of course,” she said slowly, “there’s always some gimmick.”
“And what may be this particular one?”
“Children,” she said. “We don’t intend to make the mistake your generation did and put off children till we get neurotic or it’s too late.”
“Is this your idea or Alan’s?”
“He didn’t mention it yet, at least about us personally, but it’s his idea I’m sure, for he thinks the biological aspect of marriage should be settled as quickly as possible. With life-expectancy rising constantly, we should live till we’re well over eighty. There’s so much to learn these days we should get the biological side of marriage out of the way when we’re too young to be any good at anything else. But the trouble is money. I absolutely refuse to consider Alan turning himself into a corporation slave at the very moment in his life when he ought to be as mobile as possible. I want him to sit the exams for External Affairs. With his understanding of human nature, he’d be wonderful in External.”
I gave my jaw a rueful rub.
“Well,” she said, “wouldn’t he?”
“He’ll have to wait awhile before he reports direct to Mike Pearson.”
“Well, what will he have to do if he gets into External?”
“My dear girl, tell him to ask his step-father. Jack Lubliner’s been in External for twenty years.”
“Does Mr. Lubliner report to Mr. Pearson?”
“I suppose he does sometimes. But the pay isn’t going to be astronomic in External. What about Alan’s father? Is there any money there?”
Sally shook her head. “His father has to pay alimony to his second wife, and there are his mistresses and cars and clubs and trips to Florida and his golf and his liquor and his clothes and the general corruption of his entire personality. Alan doesn’t hope for a dime from his father, and that’s all right with me.”
Silence fell again and we both stared into the fire. I felt young with the sweet, lovely, sad joy of youth, the soft creative sadness of youth I thought had left me forever and I remembered Catherine coming out of the lake when she was eighteen with the summer water streaming off her shoulders and thighs, and myself, later that day when the sun had set, watching a grain boat silhouetted against the western sky and feeling the sweet pain all through me, too innocent even to guess that what I craved was physical love with Catherine.
“George,” she murmured, “you’re so nice and easy to talk to.”
“Come over and kiss a used-up man on the brow.”
“But you haven’t answered a single one of my questions.”
“That’s why I’m so nice and easy to talk to.”
We were silent again and I stole a glance at her rapt profile and felt a flash of resentment because she was well and Catherine was not.
“George,” she said, “I wish I wasn’t so shy. There’s something pretty personal I want to ask and I’m shy.” She flushed slightly and did not look at me. “Do you think I ought to spend a weekend up north with Alan? You know what I’m talking about, I suppose.”
“What do you think yourself?”
“How is he going to know if he really wants to marry me unless he’s found out first if I’m any good? It was your generation that first had that idea, wasn’t it?”
“My generation was wonderful, but it’s my impression that the first people who had that particular idea were Adam and Eve.”
“It’s the accepted thing in Sweden, you know.”
“I know. And the Swedes are such a joyous people.”
“What are you making fun of now?”
“Only the plans of mice and men.”
“Have you gone old-fashioned now you’re middle-aged?”
“Probably.”
“The trouble would be Mummy, of course. I hate lying, George, I hate lying, and if I went up north with Alan I’d have to lie to Mummy and it wouldn’t do any good if I did, for she’d know anyway. She knows everything, doesn’t she?”
“Not quite, but you’re right that she’d know that.”
“If she wasn’t Mummy I wouldn’t care. Lots of people I know go north and it’s kind of a conspiracy between them and their parents. They tell their parents it’s just for the skiing, and their parents pretend to believe it because they did the same themselves once. Children hate embarrassing their parents these days.”
“They always did, Sally.”
“But I couldn’t do that to Mummy. Somehow I think it would make her miserable. It would bring all sorts of things up. Dad, and stuff like that.”
“I see,” I said, and looked away and found myself staring at Jerome’s picture.
“I’ve never understood why she was in love with a stinker like him,” Sally said. “But she was – wasn’t she?”
“Of course.”
“Was he in love with her, too?”
“Of course.”
“Then why did he behave like that?”
“I suppose because he was a man.”
“That’s no answer.”
“No, it’s not much of an answer.”
My expression must have betrayed me, for it was two in the morning and we were both tired from excitement and from being so close and perceptive.
She said sharply: “George, why is this the second time tonight that you and I have talked about Dad? It’s more than a year since we’ve even mentioned him.”
I shrugged.
“You’re hiding something,” she said. “I can always tell when you are.”
“So can your mother,” I said. “And she was able to tell the same thing about me tonight.” Our eyes met and I took the plunge. “Sally, you’re right. It’s not been entirely an accident that we’ve both talked of your father tonight. People are more mediums than they guess, at least some are. Since I’ve got to tell you in a day or two I’d better tell you now.”
She sat upright and looked about five years older, for she knew this was important.
“It’s going to startle you and shock you and I wish I didn’t have to say it, but you’ll have to know sooner or later and I’d better be the one who tells.”
Her level glance met mine.
“It’s certainly been no accident that I’ve been talking about your father tonight, for I’ve been thinking of nothing else. Sally –” I paused and then I jumped in. “Sally,” I said quietly, “your father isn’t dead after all. I just discovered that today.”
Her expression did not alter.
“He’s back in Montreal. He telephoned me at the university and just before I met you and Alan, I talked to him over the phone.”
She turned slightly pale and became a little more tense but she said nothing.
“I gather his story is not as unusual as you might think. Or at least as I might think. You knew he was in the French underground and you were told – we all were told – he’d been killed there. Well it seems he was captured instead and his life was spared because he was a doctor.”
Quickly I went through the same story I had told Catherine. While I talked, her pallor changed to a bright flush and I saw her little fingers clenched hard. Still she did not speak.
“There’s only one more thing I want to say,” I said. “I’m glad he’s back and so is your mother. I liked him and I respected him.”
“Then you’ve told Mummy?”
I nodded.
“George,” she flared at me, “why didn’t you tell him to go to hell? To go to the States. To go anywhere. Why did you tell Mummy?”
Our eyes locked and after a time she looked away. “Okay, I guess you win. Now I’ll take one of your cigarettes, if you don’t mind.”
I gave her one, lit it for her, and lit another for myself. I had sm
oked far too many that day and my mouth tasted like the rim of a porthole.
Suddenly Sally broke down and cried. Not in years had I seen her cry, but now she sobbed like a child and I sat beside her with my arm about her slim shoulders trying to comfort her and doing no good whatever.
After a while she looked up, wiped her eyes and blew her nose and turned away.
I heard her say as though she were ashamed: “Did he happen to ask about me?”
“He asked about you almost at once. And very, very fondly.”
She began to cry again. “He was such a damned fool!”
“Yes, dear, he was all of that.”
“Didn’t he ever guess how much we all loved him?”
“He didn’t guess. He knew.”
“And still he went away and left us?”
“He was a strange man and that was a strange time.”
She turned and stared into the fire, her two little fists hard under her chin, her neat little legs pressed together.
“I wish he was dead. I never want to see him again.”
Then she rose and went to the window and pulled the cord on the draperies, parted them, and stared out at the moonlit snow. The moon had gone far around and there were only a few patches of light where it struck the snow. But it still glimmered from the glass roof of the conservatory.
“Please be nice to him when you meet him,” I said.
Still staring out into the night, she answered: “How do I know how I’ll be to him?”
“Just don’t shut the door in his face, that’s all.”
“I may even slam it in his face. He slammed it in ours.” She turned and her face had the fighting look I had seen so often on her father’s. “How do I know anything? All I know is tonight I came home happier than I ever was in my life and walked into this and now I feel horrible. How do I know how I’ll behave if I meet him? I may break down and weep like a baby or perhaps I’ll simply not care. He’s old and I’m young. Why should I feel responsible for him?”
We looked at each other and felt sad.
“Why does everybody stand up for him?” she said.
“Everybody doesn’t.”
“But you do. I think there’s something neurotic in your whole attitude. It’s all mixed up with how you feel about Mummy. She loved him and you want to kid yourself you love him, too. You want to share him with her the same way you shared me.”
I shook my head.
“I know I’m sounding awful and I hate to sound awful, but why don’t you admit that Mummy’s human and isn’t perfect? Why don’t you admit that she made a mistake?”
“Because she didn’t. Not in marrying your father.”
She stamped her foot. “You’re hopeless.”
I became angry not because she had called me hopeless but because suddenly her whole attitude angered me.
“You’re talking like a child,” I said. “Do you think my generation invented neuroses? Do you think things in the Thirties were the same as now? Mistakes? For God sake, of course we made them! But let me tell you something, Sally. You haven’t earned the right to despise your father. You may have that right, but by God, you’ve not earned it.”
Our eyes met and she looked away, still headstrong, considerably upset, resentful and guilty because she was. Truly I thought this girl felt guilty whenever she detected a trace of neurosis in herself and this made me smile grimly. Was neurosis the new word for sin?
“I’m sorry, George.”
“That’s all right.”
“What are those pills you take to make you sleep?”
“Seconal. Why don’t you take a couple?”
“One will be quite enough. I hate dope.”
I got up and went down the hall to the bathroom found the seconal and came back with two little capsules in my hand. I got a glass of water in the kitchen and came back to the living room with it and handed Sally the tablets and the glass. She was kneeling on the sofa as stiff as though she were out cold, as silent as though she were in a trance. Automatically she took one tablet and the glass and swallowed the tablet and took a sip of water and handed the glass back. I returned it to the kitchen and came back to the living room and saw it was a quarter past two.
“I’m going to bed,” I said. “I’m tired out and I’ve got work to do in the morning and tomorrow afternoon I have to go to Ottawa.”
God knows I was tired. Right down into the bones, as I often told myself I was during the worst of Catherine’s crises, and as sad as a folk-song. But when I had undressed and washed and gone to bed and turned out the light I was still wide awake and unable to sleep.
After a while – it may have been half an hour – lying with my eyes closed I became aware of somebody in the room.
“It’s only me,” Sally’s voice whispered. “I’m sorry, George, for some of the things I said to you.”
I felt the edge of the mattress go down as it took her weight and a moment later I felt her hand on my forehead. It was gentle and healing and I had never felt it there before. So this girl was motherly after all. I had always suspected she was. This girl was motherly, and how lucky a boy Alan Royce might be.
“You said I hadn’t earned the right,” she whispered, “and that really reached me. It must be awful to be middle-aged and remember so much and know that everybody thinks it’s natural for middle-aged people to be dull and put up with everything.”
“Some of us get used to it before we die. At least that’s what I’m told.”
Out of a sea-deep silence I heard her say: “Why did Mummy marry Dad?”
“Why do you want to marry Alan?”
“I want to marry Alan because I think I love him. And I want to marry him because I want children and a home of my own.”
“That’s why your mother and father wanted to marry each other.”
“Him too?”
“Of course him too. He wanted a home and children as much as any man I ever met.”
“You mean he wanted me? You mean I wasn’t born just because he came home drunk and took a chance?”
“My God, girl, where is your backside? I want to slap it.”
“But I thought none of you people wanted children.” “Oh brave new world!” I said.
From Sally there came a sigh, a rending noise of a sigh, and it was followed by a sob.
“You mean he really wanted me? He really did? Oh George, thank you for telling me that! Thank you, thank you, thank you!”
I felt her going away from me, and me going away from her, and I went all the way out to the Rocky Mountains where I saw foothills shaped like the bodies of brown females and a snow-covered mountain spire rose-hued in the distance and heard a waterfall and felt the coolness in the air about a waterfall in the high mountains. Then darkness flooded over the scene with a roll and a fox walked out of the lodgepole pines and watched me.
I heard Sally: “But long before Dad appeared, you and Mummy were in love, weren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Why didn’t you marry her then? Why didn’t you?”
“That would be a long story for three o’clock in the morning.”
“But why?”
“No money. No job. No prospects. Too much pride. The depression. But mostly not enough courage.”
Again her hand came over my forehead, rested there, and I wondered which was the child, she or myself.
“What was Mummy like when she was my age?”
“How do I know? I was too much in love to know.”
“It must have been nice on the Lakeshore when you and Mummy were kids.”
“Very nice. No airport. A minor journey into Montreal. French Canadian farms with stone houses and old barns.”
“The first time you saw her, what did she look like?”
“The first time I saw her – really saw her – she was all dressed in green.”
“Aren’t those the words of a song?”
But after Sally left me and all was quiet I was still unable to sleep. Lyi
ng in bed with my eyes open, the snow outside a tabula rasa now that the moon no longer made shadows in the squirrel tracks, the city silent, lying there in the extreme precariousness of three o’-clock in the morning I remembered the first time I had really seen Catherine. It was true what I had told Sally, the first time I saw her she was all dressed in green.
PART TWO
CHAPTER I
I was a seventeen year old boy standing just inside the screen door at the back of our house in Dorval on the shore of Lake St. Louis west of Montreal. An August morning was rising in full tide with cicadas shrilling and a heat haze was building over the lake and I was feeling the heat, especially the humidity of it, for only the night before I had returned from a canoe trip through a region where the days were astringent and the nights were cold. I had been one of eighteen boys led by a schoolmaster from Frobisher and we had paddled from Port Arthur along the north shore of Lake Superior into Huron to Georgian Bay, whence we had gone our several ways home by bus and train. We had looked at those stone islands since made famous by the painters of the Group of Seven, we had paddled into lonely little villages called Jackfish and Marathon, we had broiled fresh trout and whitefish over camp fires, had got up with the sun and fallen asleep when the western sky was the color of a burnt orange.
Now I was in the best condition of my life and was home smelling the flat fresh water and sedge of Lake St. Louis and feeling the heat and recognizing for the first time how lush was this country around Montreal. I was home and was proud and grateful. I was a religious boy, and being acutely conscious that I was clumsy in athletics, and that other boys did not take me seriously, I had prayed to God that I might be strong and popular like the rest. On that trip I had discovered that though I was clumsy I was at least strong, and the other boys had liked me. I had found myself able to carry heavier weights than most and to paddle for hours without a rest. Now, home from the adventure on the water and in the bush, having seen wild bears and heard timber wolves bark, home on the flat shoreline in the familiar heat of a Montreal August, I had found my mother more charmingly feckless than ever and my father more of a boy.
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