When Léopold is given something, he walks round it and decides what the gift is worth in terms of the giver. If it seems cheap, he mutters without raising his eyes. If it seems important, he flashes a brief, shrewd look that any adult, but no child, mistakes for a glance of complicity. The camera, though second-hand, has been well received. It is round his neck; he puts down his fork and holds the camera and makes all the children uneasy by staring at each in turn and deciding none of them worth an inch of film.
“Poor little lad,” says his mother, who flings out whatever she feels, no matter who is in the way. “He has never had a father – only a grandfather.”
The old man may not have heard. He is playing his private game of trying to tell his five English-Canadian sons-in-law apart. The two Bobs, the Don, the Ian, and the Ken are interchangeable, like postage stamps of the Queen’s profile. Two are Anglicans, two United Church, and the most lackluster is a Lutheran, but which is he? The old man lifts his head and smiles a great slow smile. His smile acquits his daughters; he forgives them for having ever thought him a shameless old person; but the five sons-in-law are made uneasy. They wonder if they are meant to smile back, or something weird like that. Well, they may not have much in common with each other, but here they are five together, not isolated, not alone. Their children, with round little noses, and round little blue eyes, are at the next table, and two or three babies are sleeping in portable cots upstairs.
It is a windy spring day, with a high clean sky, and black branches hitting on the windows. The family’s guest that day is Father Zinkin, who is dressed just like anyone, without even a clerical collar to make him seem holy. This, to the five men, is another reason for discomposure; for they might be respectful of a robe, but what is this man, with his polo-necked sweater and his nose in the wine and his rough little jokes? Is he really the Lord’s eunuch? I mean, they silently ask each other, would you trust him? You know what I mean … Father Zinkin has just come back from Rome. He says that the trees are in leaf, and he got his pale jaundiced sunburn sitting at a sidewalk café. This is Montreal, it is still cold, and the daughters’ five fur coats are piled upstairs on their mother’s bed. They accept the news about Rome without grace. If he thinks it is so sunny in Rome, why didn’t he stay there? Who asked him to come back? That is how every person at that table feels about news from abroad, and it is the only sentiment that can ever unite them. When you say it is sunny elsewhere, you are suggesting it is never sunny here. When you describe the trees of Rome, what you are really saying is there are no trees in Montreal.
Why is he at the table, then, since he brings them nothing but unwelcome news? The passionately anti-clerical family cannot keep away from priests. They will make an excuse: they will say they admire his mind, or his gifts with language – he speaks seven. He eats and drinks just like anyone, he has travelled, and been psychoanalyzed, and is not frightened by women. At least, he does not seem to be. Look at the way he pours wine for Lucia, and then for Pauline, and how his tone is just right, not a scrap superior. And then, he is not Canadian. He does not remind them of anything. None of the children, from Lucia, who is twenty-nine, to Léopold, nine today, has been baptized. Father Zinkin sits down and eats with them as if they were. Until the girls grew up and married they never went to church. Now that they are Protestants they go because their husbands want to; so, their mother thinks, this is what all the fighting and the courage came to, finally; all the struggling and being condemned and cut off from one’s own kind: the five girls simply joined another kind, just as stupid.
No, thinks the old father at the head of the table: more stupid. At any rate, less interesting. Less interesting because too abstract. You would have to be a genius to be a true Protestant, and those he has met … At night, when he is trying to get to sleep, he thinks of his sons-in-law. He remembers their names without trouble: the two Bobs, the Don, the Ian, and the last one – Keith, or Ken? Ken. Monique married Ken. Alone, in the dark, he tries to match names and faces. Are both Bobs thin? Pink in the face? Yes, and around the neck. They lose their hair young – something to do with English hairbrushes, he invents. The old man droops now, for the sight of his sons-in-law can send him off to sleep. His five daughters – he knows their names, and he knows his own sons. His grandchildren seem to belong to a new national type, with round heads, and quite large front teeth. You would think some Swede or other had been around Montreal on a bicycle so as to create this new national type. Sharon, and Marilyn and Cary and Gary and Gail. Cary and Gary.
“Nobody cares,” his wife says, very sharply.
He has been mumbling, talking to himself, saying the names of children aloud. She minds because of Father Zinkin. When she and her husband are alone, and he talks too much, repeats the same thing over and over, she squeezes her eyes until only a pinpoint of amber glows between the lids, and she squeezes out through a tight throat, “All right, all right,” and even, “Shut up” in a rising crescendo of three. Not even her children know she says “Shut up” to the old man; “nobody cares” is just a family phrase. When it is used on Don Carlos, the basset, now under the children’s table, it makes him look as if he might cry real tears.
She speaks lightly, quickly now, in English. She sits, very straight, powdered and pretty, and says, in a musical English all her own, not the speech of the city at all, “They say Jews look after their own people, but it’s not true. I was told about some people who had a very old sick father. They had to tie him to a chair sometimes, because he would go downtown and steal things or start to cry in the street. As they couldn’t afford a home for him, and he wouldn’t have gone anyway, they decided to leave him. They moved half the furniture away and the old man sat crying on a chair and saw his family go. He sat weeping, not protesting, and his children slouched out without saying goodbye. Yes, he sat weeping, a respectable old man. Now, this man’s wife gave Russian lessons to earn her living, and one day, when she was giving a lesson to a woman I know, she said, ‘Come to the window.’ My friend looked out and saw an old-fashioned Jew going by. The woman said, ‘That was my husband.’ She seemed pleased with herself, as though she had done what was right for her children.”
“Was he dead?” asks Gérard. He is always waiting for some simple, casual confirmation about the existence of ghosts.
“No, of course not. He was just an old man, and someone had taken him in. Some Russian. So,” she concedes, “he was looked after.” But, as she likes her stories cruel, so that her children will know more about life than she once did, unhappy endings are her habit. She feels obliged to add, “Someone took him in, but probably gave him a miserable time. He must be dead now. This was long ago, during the last war, when people were learning Russian. It was the thing to do then.”
Her children are worried by this story, but perhaps the father has not heard it. He is still eating his fruit, taking a mouthful and then forgetting to swallow. Suddenly something he has been thinking silently must have excited him, for he taps his spoon on the edge of the glass dish.
“As you get old you lose everything,” he says. “You lose your God, if you ever had one. When you know they want you to die, you want to live. You want to be loved. Even that.”
His children are so embarrassed, so humiliated, they feel as if ashes and sand were being ground in their skins. The sons-in-law are revolted. They look at their plates. Honestly, they can never come to this house without something being said about religion or something personal.
“You lose your parents,” the old man continues. “You have to outlive them. Everything is loss.” Before they can say “nobody cares” he is off once more: “No need for priests,” he mutters. “If there is no sin, then no need for redemption. Dead words. Tell me, Father whoever you are,” (he asks the glass dish of fruit) “will you explain why these words should be used?” Muttering – he has been muttering all his life.
“Oh, shut up,” they are thinking. A chorus of silent English: “Shut up!” If only the old man could
hear the words, he would see a great black wall; he would hear a sigh, a rattle, like the black trees outside the windows, hitting the panes.
The old man shakes his head over his plate: No, no, he never wanted to marry. He wanted to become a priest. Either God is, or He is not. If He is, I shall live for Him. If He is not, I shall fight His ghost. At forty-nine he was married off by a Jesuit, who was an old school friend. He and the shy, soft, orphaned girl who had been placed in a convent at six, and had left it, now, at eighteen, exchanged letters about comparative religion. She seemed intelligent – he has forgotten now what he imagined their life could ever be like. Presently what they had in common was her physical horror of him and his knowledge of it, and then they had in common all their children.
III
When the old man had finished his long thoughts, everyone except Gérard and Father Zinkin had disappeared. The small children were made to kiss him – moist reluctant mouths on his cheek – “before Granpa takes his nap.” Léopold, who never touched anyone, looked at him briefly through his new camera and said softly to him, and only to him, “Il n’y a pas assez de lumière.” Their dark identical eyes reflected each other. Then everyone vanished, the women to rattle plates in the kitchen, Léopold to his room, the five fathers to play some game with the children at the back of the house. He sat in his leather armchair, sometimes he slept, and he heard Gérard protesting, “I know the difference between seeing and dreaming.”
“Well, it was a waking dream,” said the priest. “There is no snow on the streets, but you say there had been a storm.”
The old man looked. The white light in the room surely was the reflection of a snowy day? The room seemed filled with white furniture, white flowers. The priest, because he was dressed like Gérard, tried to sound like a young man and an old friend. Only when the priest turned his head, seeking an ashtray, did the old man see what Father Zinkin knew. His interest in Gérard was intellectual. His mind was occupied with its own power. The old man imagined him, narrow, suspicious, in a small parish, lording it over a flock of old maids. They were thin, their eyebrows met over their noses.
Gérard said, “All right, what if I was analyzed? What difference would it make?”
“You would be yourself. You would be yourself without effort.”
The old man had been waiting for him to say, “it would break the mirror”; for what is the good of being yourself, if you are Gérard?
“What I mean is, you can’t understand about this girl. So there’s no use talking about her.”
“I know about girls,” said the other. “I went out. I even danced.”
It struck the old man how often he had been told by priests they knew about life because they had, once, danced with girls. He was willing to let them keep that as a memory of life, but what about Gérard, as entangled with a woman as a man of thirty? But then Gérard lost interest and said, “I’d want to be analyzed in French,” so it didn’t matter.
“It wouldn’t work. Your French isn’t spontaneous enough. Now, begin again. You were on the street, it was daylight, then you were in the kitchen in the dark.”
How the old man despised this self-indulgence! He felt it was not his business to put a stop to it. His wife stopped it simply by coming in and beginning to talk about herself. When she talked about her children she seemed to be talking about herself, and when the priest said, to console some complaint she was making, “The little one will be brilliant,” meaning Léopold, he seemed to be prophesying a future in which she would shine. Outside, the others were breaking up into groups, carrying cots, ushering children into cars. It would take a good ten minutes, and so she sat perched on the arm of a sofa with her hat on her head and her coat on her arm, and said, “Léopold will be brilliant, but I never wanted him. I’d had six children, five close together. French Canadians of our background, for I daren’t say class, it sounds so … Well, we, people like ourselves, do not usually have these monstrous families, regardless of what you may have been told, Father. My mother had no one but me, and when she tried having a second child, it killed her. When I knew I was having Léopold I took ergot. I lay here, on this very sofa, in the middle of the afternoon. Nothing happened, and nothing showed. He was born without even a strawberry mark to condemn me.”
She likes to shock, the old man remembered. How much you can take is measure of your intelligence. So she thinks. Oddly enough, she can be shocked.
She stopped speaking and sighed and smoothed the collar of her coat. When she thought, “My son Gérard is sleeping with a common girl,” it shocked her. She thought, now, seeing him slouch past the doorway, scarcely able to wait for the house to empty so that he could go off and find that girl and spend a disgusting Saturday night with her, “Gérard knows. He looks at his father, and me, and now he knows. Before, he only thought he knew. He knows now why the old man follows me up the stairs.”
She said very lightly, “My son has sex on the brain. It’s all he thinks about now. I suppose all boys are the same. You must have been that way once, Father.” Really, that was farther than she had ever gone. The priest looked like a statue resembling the person he had been a moment before.
Once she had departed the house seemed to relax, like an animal that feels safe and can sleep. The old man was to walk the dog and do something about his children. Those had been his instructions for the day. Oh, yes, and he was to stop thinking about himself. He put on his hat and coat and walked down the street with Don Carlos. Don Carlos dug the wet spring lawns with tortoiseshell nails. Let off the leash, he at once rolled in something horrible. The old man wanted to scold, but the wind made all conversation between himself and the dog impossible. The wind suddenly dropped; it was to the old man like a sudden absence of fear. He could dream as well as Gérard. He invented: he and Don Carlos went through the gap of a fence and were in a large sloping pasture. He trod on wildflowers. From the spongy spring soil grew crab apple trees and choke cherries, and a hedge of something he no longer remembered that, was sweet and white. Presently they – he and the dog – looked down on a village and the two silvery spires of a church. He saw the date over the door: 1885. The hills on the other side of the water were green and black with shadows. He had never seen such a blue and green day. But he was still here, on the street, and had not forgotten it for a second. Imagination was as good as sleepwalking any day.
Léopold stood on the porch, watching him through his camera. He seemed to be walking straight into Léopold’s camera, magically reduced in size.
“Why, Léo,” he said. “You’re not supposed to be here,” not caring to show how happy it made him that Léopold was here. They were bound so soon to lose each other – why start?
“Wouldn’t.”
“Wouldn’t what?”
“Wouldn’t go to Pauline’s. She’s coming back to get us for supper.”
“I don’t want anything more to eat today.”
“Neither do I. And I’m not going.”
Who would dare argue with Léopold? He put his camera down. One day he would have the assurance of a real street, a real father, a real afternoon.
“Well, well,” his father said. “So they’re all gone.” He felt shy. He would never have enough of Léo – he would never know what became of him. He edged past and held the door open for the dog.
“All gone. Il n’y a que moi.” Léopold, who never touched anyone, pressed his lips to his father’s hand.
Up North
When they woke up in the train, their bed was black with soot and there was soot in his Mum’s blondie hair. They were miles north of Montreal, which had, already, sunk beneath his remembrance. “D’you know what I sor in the night?” said Dennis. He had to keep his back turned while she dressed. They were both in the same berth, to save money. He was small, and didn’t take up much room, but when he woke up in that sooty autumn dawn, he found he was squashed flat against the side of the train. His Mum was afraid of falling out and into the aisle; they had a lower berth, bu
t she didn’t trust the strength of the curtain. Now she was dressing, and sobbing; really sobbing. For this was worse than anything she had ever been through, she told him. She had been right through the worst of the air raids, yet this was the worst, this waking in the cold, this dark, dirty dawn, everything dirty she touched, her clothes – oh, her clothes! – and now having to dress as she lay flat on her back. She daren’t sit up. She might knock her head.
“You know what I sor?” said the child patiently. “Well, the train must of stopped, see, and some little men with bundles on their backs got on. Other men was holding lanterns. They were all little. They were all talking French.”
“Shut up,” said Mum. “Do you hear me?”
“Sor them,” said the boy.
“You and your bloody elves.”
“They was people.”
“Little men with bundles,” said Mum, trying to dress again. “You start your fairy tales with your Dad and I don’t know what he’ll give you.”
It was this mythical, towering, half-remembered figure they were now travelling to join up north.
Roy McLaughlin, travelling on the same train, saw the pair, presently, out of his small red-lidded eyes. Den and his Mum were dressed and as clean as they could make themselves, and sitting at the end of the car. McLaughlin was the last person to get up, and he climbed down from his solitary green-curtained cubicle conspicuous and alone. He had to pad the length of the car in a trench coat and city shoes – he had never owned slippers, bathrobe, or pajamas – past the passengers, who were drawn with fatigue, pale under the lights. They were men, mostly; some soldiers. The Second World War had been finished, in Europe, a year and five months. It was a dirty, rickety train going up to Abitibi. McLaughlin was returning to a construction camp after three weeks in Montreal. He saw the girl, riding with her back to the engine, doing her nails, and his faculties absently registered “Limey bride” as he went by. The kid, looking out the window, turned and stared. McLaughlin thought “Pest,” but only because children and other men’s wives made him nervous and sour when they were brought around camp on a job.
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