Father was back at his old games. An archery butt with circles of red, white and blue rose over our peony bed and twenty-five yards in front of it was Father surrounded by a bevy of children. Under our lone apple tree Catherine Carey stood with a basket of phlox, roses and late delphinium on her arm, she was laughing infectiously as she told my mother not to concern herself, that nothing had happened to her and that it would have been her own fault if something had. My mother was chattering in her usual way without listening to a word anyone said and my father – whom I had never been able to take seriously as a father – had a sheepish expression on his sheep dog’s face and was leaning on a cross bow of his own manufacture which was certainly as lethal as any used at Agincourt. The actual color of Catherine’s dress that morning I do not know – it might have been white or red or blue – but with the sunlit green of the garden around her, with the dappled green of the shadowed grass under her feet, green was her color at that supreme moment of my youth.
The cause of the commotion was not unusual in the Stewart household. Once again Father had nearly hit somebody with one of his arrows, and this time the somebody had been Catherine. He had his archery range directly across the lawn beside the house, and anyone entering by the back gate walked right into it. It had been my mother’s frightened cry that had brought me to the back door, and now both my parents were talking in the way they had, not angrily (they never got angry) but without listening to a word the other said.
“Hastings, what if you’d killed poor Catherine!”
“But Carrie, we weren’t using the Parthian arrows, we were using the English ones.”
“You don’t get gangrene from English arrows,” one of the children said.
“But Mrs. Stewart” – this from Catherine – “don’t you see it’s perfectly all right. Nothing hit me.”
“But something very nearly did. And Hastings, if you’d killed poor Catherine, what would you have said?” Without waiting for an answer she turned to Catherine and bubbled, “It was so darling of your mother to send me delphiniums because they’re my favorite flowers. They always remind me of naval officers. Look out, Hastings, here come the dogs!”
Our four dogs, all named after British admirals and generals, all dangerous to strangers, all large, had come charging out and now they surrounded Catherine barking and leaping and barking again, and she tried to fend them off because they were violent, and Beatty and Haig, bull terriers trained by Father to go straight for a marauder’s throat, caught hold of her flower basket with their teeth and tried to tear it away from her.
“Down!” shouted Father. “Down and to heel.”
Those dogs sitting down around Catherine, their tongues hanging out and their flanks throbbing like bellows, looked slightly more alarming than they had looked before.
“There was no danger to Catherine,” Father explained. “She knew all about the archery range. Don’t you remember the time we played William Tell? It was Catherine who shot the apple off Billy Aird’s head.”
“I wish it had been Catherine who shot the apple,” said Catherine. “But the year you played William Tell, Catherine was such a sick little girl she couldn’t even eat an apple.”
“Catherine dear,” said my mother with that exaggerated anxiety which always made me nervous, “how is your poor little heart today?”
“It’s so much better I don’t even know it’s there.”
“It’s so horrid to know it’s there, isn’t it, that ugly little thing bumping up and down inside of us. Hastings, make the dogs go away. They make me nervous.”
Father commanded the dogs to depart and they went. Animals and children always liked to please him. Then, while Catherine and my mother tried to talk to each other, Father turned to the children and resumed a monologue I had heard many times before.
“The reason for the shape of this English arrowhead,” he explained, “is very simple. The Parthians made their arrowheads with barbs so you had to tear the flesh to get them out and a man got gangrene every time. But the English liked to kill clean.” Father’s loving finger stroked the hard smooth blade he had made in his workshop in the barn. “When this kind of an arrow hit a French knight, it shot right through the eyeball into the brain. That’s the English way every time. When they kill, they kill clean.”
“What’s the difference between killing clean and killing dirty?” one of the children said.
“Killing without gangrene.”
“Tell us more about gangrene.”
Father did so, with detail, accuracy and gruesomeness. I did not listen because I had heard it before, along with the difference between getting bitten by a rattlesnake and a cobra, and between fighting Wellington and Napoleon, and between the size of the bites made by lions and grizzly bears. My world turned upside down as I looked at Catherine enveloped in the sunshine pouring down through the branches of the apple tree. The air began to sing and I felt faint from beauty and from something new I could not understand.
She left before I revealed myself and I saw her back pass through the gate to the road, but I was shy and did not want the others to see me follow her. So I went back into the house and out by another door and through a neighbor’s property and came by a roundabout route to the highway where a farmer’s cart creaked past me loaded with fresh vegetables, the farmer nodding in the heat. Catherine was twenty yards ahead walking slowly and now she was no longer dressed in green but in light itself, and I tell you I saw a nimbus around her.
She turned as she heard my steps and cried out: “George! I didn’t know you were home!”
I came up to her and looked at her face and then at the ground. “Oh, I got home last night.”
“Was it wonderful?”
“I guess so.”
“Of course it was wonderful! And so were you to make a trip like that. I wish I could, but of course I can’t. But I’ve got something new to show you just the same. Father bought me a sailboat and I’ve learned how to sail. That’s not bad for Catherine. I’m really improving at last.”
I blurted out: “Improving? You’re perfect!”
We looked at each other and Catherine stepped quietly forward and placed her hands on my shoulders and looked up. Her eyes grew soft and large and her voice sounded like a cello.
“What a silly thing to say! But what a lovely thing to say!”
Then she rose on tip-toe and I felt her full arms go about my neck and her full lips warm and soft on mine, and in a flood of shyness we were looking at each other and it was my first experience of a miracle. I saw her hand pass over her sable hair, that sable hair that seemed so light and alive, and the queen-like serenity return to her heart-shaped face, and I knew, though I had never seen a woman, how the white fullness of her breasts would contrast with the tan fullness of her upper arms, and all these sensual images were so sacred that I blushed lest my knowledge of them would seem a profanity, and I looked at the ground and saw her sandaled feet, very small feet, and how her toes were a little too big because the joints had been swollen and gnarled by rheumatism.
“If there’s a breeze this afternoon, would you come out sailing and try my new boat?”
“You mean you really want me?”
“George,” she said gently, “why do you talk about yourself that way?”
“Well –”
“I won’t let you do it again. You see, compared to me you’re – well, apart from being pretty small to handle a boat, I’m not allowed out alone in case a squall comes up and the sails have to be taken in in a hurry. Besides, I want to hear about your trip.”
“But all sorts of people will want to go out with you.”
Her hand rested on my arm and her eyes on mine. “Do you really think so?”
“Why sure.”
“George, you’re so sweet.” She turned away. “Haven’t you ever noticed that the boys are afraid of me. And why not? They’ve been taught by their mothers to think of me as ‘poor Catherine.’ They’ve been told to be nice to me, but at the same time th
ey’ve been warned not to become fond of me for fear that one of these days they’ll find themselves engaged to an invalid.”
“Oh no! That’s not true.”
“If I was a mother and saw my son falling in love with a girl like me, I’d do the same.” She took her hand away and gave me a teasing smile. “So now! I’ve warned you myself. So let’s not argue any more. I’ve always loved your parents because they never warned you against me. Remember the time when I was a little girl and had the rheumatic fever the first time? All that winter, you were the only boy who ever came to see me. Do you remember?”
I did remember: that January morning when my mother had virtually ordered me to go down the road to see poor little Catherine Carey who was sick and had such a hard time. It was a day of white and green frost with the whole of Lake St. Louis like a Saskatchewan prairie when the arctic wind sweeps it under the sun. The wind swept up whorls of shining snow crystals and the sun flashed through them and the dry snow blew into my eyes as I walked the lakeshore road to the Carey house. After I was let in by the maid, I saw Mrs. Carey coming down the stairs in an apron and from the tone in her voice I knew she was glad I was there.
I had never liked Catherine’s mother; in the way children have of knowing such things, I had sensed that she was a resentful woman. She was also much younger than her husband, whom everyone liked.
“Isn’t it nice,” she said to Catherine, and at that moment there was no love in her voice, “for George to come to see you on a day like this? Not every little boy would do that.”
Catherine was sitting up in bed with a ribbon in her hair and a shawl about her shoulders and her face white and thin with enormous eyes. Is there any human expression as wise, as utterly knowledgeable, as poignantly aware as that of a child who longs to live but knows it is crippled? Who longs to please but knows that its body – its very self – makes it impossible to please? It was there on her face, that expression I was later to see so often, and it said as clearly as words: “Please don’t anybody mind. Please don’t. I don’t want to be sick. I want to be like everyone else.”
Mrs. Carey left us and Catherine said: “The doctor told me I had the biggest temperature he ever saw.”
“That must be pretty big.”
“I had one of the biggest pains he ever saw, too.” Then she gave me the odd smile with the tiny droop of the left lid and her face said: “I’m glad to be here. Please nobody mind because I want to live so much.”
“I guess you’ll soon be getting out,” I said.”
Oh yes.”
“We were going to play hockey this afternoon, but the snow drifted all over the rink so I guess we don’t.”
“But can’t you shovel the snow off? It must be such fun, playing hockey. Are you good at it?”
“Oh, I’m no good at stuff like that. They always pick me last on the teams, and sometimes they don’t even give me a game in.”
“They’re mean.”
“No, I guess it’s just because I’m clumsy, like my Aunt Agnes said. She says I’ll always be clumsy.”
Our conversation went on like this and then she gave a little wiggle of joy in the sheets.
“No-pain is the loveliest feeling in the world,” she said. “And there’s one thing you’ll never know that I know – what it feels like to see the squirrels come back.”
“The squirrels?”
“Of course. I thought I’d never see them again, but this morning my old gray squirrel came to the window to see me and Mummy gave him nuts. Mummy does everything for me. She’s wonderful.”
Since that January the years had passed and Catherine had become a woman. And now it was as a woman that she smiled at me.
“I’m going to be well from now on, George. I promise.”
“To look at you, nobody’d ever think you’d ever been sick.”
“Of course I can’t take long walks or go swimming, so all I can do is float in the water and get cool. But I can sail. I feel perfectly wonderful, as a matter of fact.”
She was so small and yet in a way so stately; so dignified and yet in a way so sensuous. That year I had been reading a book about Mary Queen of Scots and though I hadn’t the slightest idea how Mary had actually looked – indeed I believe she was tall – the idea of her was the idea I now had of Catherine: dark hair and high color, a certain gallant despair, a flame in the dark.
But she was also practical and matter of fact; she could be naturally gay as I never could, and she wanted to be gay. She felt my muscle and made a face pretending to be terrified of how strong I had become from my summer’s paddling.
“Well, I guess I can hang onto a jib-sheet in a blow. Do you really want me to crew for you?”
“I’m a selfish, hard-headed little woman, George. Yes, I want you.”
“What time?”
“As soon as possible after lunch. Whistle for a wind, will you George? You ought to know how to whistle for a wind. Your father’s the best wind-whistler on the lake.”
“He can always do damned fool things like that better than anyone else.”
“But whistling for a wind isn’t a damned fool thing. All the best sailors do it.” Her face broke open with happiness. “I can’t tell you how wonderful it is to have a boat of my own when I never dreamed I could ever have anything like that. It’s like being” – suddenly her gray eyes filled – “George, it’s almost like being normal.”
CHAPTER II
So that summer I entered Arcadia and the pipes played and the glory of the Lord shone round about. The colors of that summer’s end are with me yet: the heavy greens of the land and the lighter greens of the gardens, the pinks of the phlox and the ripening apples, the scarlets and tulip-yellows of tremendous sunsets when the clouds stood high as the Himalayas over the pastel-colored lake where yachts lay becalmed. Even the nights were visible. They were dark velvet before the moon rose and later, when the moon was up, Catherine and I along the shore smelled the sedge and the plants, the summer smells of growth and decay, and I thought of her as a whiteness in the dusk.
But that summer more happened to us than falling in love. If childhood is a garden, the gates closed on us then and ever afterwards we were on the outside, on the outside even of the community in which we were born.
Montreal is a world-city now with most of the symptoms of one, but in those days it was as a visiting Frenchman described it, an English garrison encysted in an overgrown French village. We belonged to the outer fringes of this garrison where the soldiering was done in the banks and trust houses and national insurance companies, the generals being the board chairmen, while the lower officers were the executives who kept things running. The English-speaking garrison of Montreal, absolutely sure of itself in the heart of the French island in North America, was a place where people knew most of the things they needed to know without having to think at all. If you were born in it, and your nature fitted it, your path was clear from childhood. Catherine and I were born in it, but neither of us fitted, and neither did our families.
Mr. Carey would have been happier as a college professor than as an officer in the trust house to which a domineering parent had consigned him. If ever a man lived a life of quiet desperation, it was he. He was quiet, small and dignified, he never raised his voice, he loved growing roses and reading books, and he quietly loathed the work he did for a living. Also he had married in early middle-age, and was unequal to his wife, who had been only twenty years old when she became his bride. Catherine was their only child.
Though I never liked Mrs. Carey, I know now that she was worthy of respect or at least of sympathy. Handsome in the Edwardian style, she was a woman who would have thrived on a busy social life and was permanently frustrated by her husband’s bookish habits. She was tactless, passionate and impatient; she was devoted to Catherine even while she resented her for the demands the child’s illnesses had made upon her.
That summer, with Catherine grown into a young woman, Mrs. Carey went into the change of lif
e and saw herself with despair as a person who had thrown her youth away. She became snappish and impatient with Catherine, who reacted against her with the sudden ruthlessness of youth.
“I’m going to McGill this fall,” Catherine told me. “Mummy says no, but I say yes. I’m going to Europe and I’m going to work and I’m going to do everything Mummy should have done herself when she was young. Mummy says I’m not strong enough, but I won’t be an invalid, I won’t! Even if I live only ten years, I mean to live those ten years.” And she talked about the candle that burned at both ends and gave out the lovely light.
Toward the end of August she said to me: “George, you must go to McGill with me this fall.”
I protested that I had to go back to Frobisher.”
You made your junior matric last spring. You can go to McGill. Go to McGill, George. Grow up and go.”
“But if I go back to Frobisher I’ll be a prefect.”
“And what difference will that make?”
At the time it seemed to me to make a lot of difference. My Aunt Agnes, who was married to a cadaverous canon with hair growing out of his ears (he was one of the spiritual guides of the upper echelons of the garrison), had always insisted that I become a prefect at Frobisher. So far as McGill was concerned, she considered it an admirable university because she knew everyone on the Board, but it was also a place which received among its students what she called the ragtag and bobtail of the city. In other words McGill had no social status. But Frobisher had it, and my aunt was determined that I become a prefect at Frobisher.
Catherine laughed at all this.
“But it’s so frightfully old-hat, as though Montreal were the center of the world. And it’s so ghastly dull. Look at your friend Jack Buchanan. Whenever I think of Frobisher I think of him. I could write a biography of Jack right now. He’ll go to R.M.C. and be a senior cadet. Then he’ll go into some St. James Street office and join the mess of a regiment. Then he’ll marry exactly the kind of girl that kind of boy always marries, and by the time he’s twenty-eight he’ll have three children. Inside ten years he’ll be having one mistress after the other and getting heavy around the waist. By the time he’s fifty he’ll look just like his father looks now, and by the time he’s seventy he’ll be on all sorts of boards, and his grandson will be exactly as he is today. I can’t stand a life like that, George, and I’m not going to let you think you can stand it, either.”
Watch that Ends the Night Page 9
