“Well, old cock,” said my father’s friend Archie McEwen, meeting him one Saturday in Montreal. “How’s Charlotte taking life in the country?” Apparently no one had expected my mother to accept the country in winter.
“Well, old cock,” I repeated to a country neighbor, Mr. Bainwood. “How’s life?” What do you suppose it meant to me, other than a kind of weathervane? Mr. Bainwood thought it over, then came round to our house and complained to my mother.
“It isn’t blasphemy,” she said, not letting him have much satisfaction from the complaint. Still, I had to apologize. “I’m sorry” was a ritual habit with even less meaning than “old cock.” “Never say that again,” my mother said after he had gone.
“Why not?”
“Because I’ve just told you not to.”
“What does it mean?”
“Nothing.”
It must have been after yet another “nothing” that one summer’s day I ran screaming around a garden, tore the heads off tulips, and – no, let another voice finish it; the only authentic voices I have belong to the dead: “… then she ate them.”
It was my father’s custom if he took me with him to visit a friend on Saturdays not to say where we were going. He was more taciturn than any man I have known since, but that wasn’t all of it; being young, I was the last person to whom anyone owed an explanation. These Saturdays have turned into one whitish afternoon, a windless snowfall, a steep street. Two persons descend the street, stepping carefully. The child, reminded every day to keep her hands still, gesticulates wildly – there is the flash of a red mitten. I will never overtake this pair. Their voices are lost in snow.
We were living in what used to be called the country and is now a suburb of Montreal. On Saturdays my father and I came in together by train. I went to the doctor, the dentist, to my German lesson. After that I had to get back to Windsor Station by myself and on time. My father gave me a boy’s watch so that the dial would be good and large. I remember the No. 83 streetcar trundling downhill and myself, wondering if the watch was slow, asking strangers to tell me the hour. Inevitably – how could it have been otherwise? – after his death, which would not be long in coming, I would dream that someone important had taken a train without me. My route to the meeting place – deviated, betrayed by stopped clocks – was always downhill. As soon as I was old enough to understand from my reading of myths and legends that this journey was a pursuit of darkness, its terminal point a sunless underworld, the dream vanished.
Sometimes I would be taken along to lunch with one or another of my father’s friends. He would meet the friend at Pauzé’s for oysters or at Drury’s or the Windsor Grill. The friend would more often than not be Scottish- or English-sounding, and they would talk as if I were invisible, as Archie McEwen had done, and eat what I thought of as English food – grilled kidneys, sweetbreads – which I was too finicky to touch. Both my parents had been made wretched as children by having food forced on them and so that particular torture was never inflicted on me. However, the manner in which I ate was subject to precise attention. My father disapproved of the North American custom that he called “spearing” (knife laid on the plate, fork in the right hand). My mother’s eye was out for a straight back, invisible chewing, small mouthfuls, immobile silence during the interminable adult loafing over dessert. My mother did not care for food. If we were alone together, she would sit smoking and reading, sipping black coffee, her elbows used as props – a posture that would have called for instant banishment had I so much as tried it. Being constantly observed and corrected was like having a fly buzzing around one’s plate. At Pauzé’s, the only child, perhaps the only female, I sat up to an oak counter and ate oysters quite neatly, not knowing exactly what they were and certainly not that they were alive. They were served as in “The Walrus and the Carpenter,” with bread and butter, pepper and vinegar. Dessert was a chocolate biscuit – plates of them stood at intervals along the counter. When my father and I ate alone, I was not required to say much, nor could I expect a great deal in the way of response. After I had been addressing him for minutes, sometimes he would suddenly come to life and I would know he had been elsewhere. “Of course I’ve been listening,” he would protest, and he would repeat by way of proof the last few words of whatever it was I’d been saying. He was seldom present. I don’t know where my father spent his waking life: just elsewhere.
What was he doing alone with a child? Where was his wife? In the country, reading. She read one book after another without looking up, without scraping away the frost on the windows. “The Russians, you know, the Russians,” she said to her mother and me, glancing around in the drugged way adolescent readers have. “They put salt on the window sills in winter.” Yes, so they did, in the nineteenth century, in the boyhood of Turgenev, of Tolstoy. The salt absorbed the moisture between two sets of windows sealed shut for half the year. She must have been in a Russian country house at that moment, surrounded by a large Russian family, living out vast Russian complications. The flat white fields beyond her imaginary windows were like the flat white fields she would have observed if only she had looked out. She was myopic; the pupil when she had been reading seemed to be the whole of the eye. What age was she then? Twenty-seven, twenty-eight. Her husband had removed her to the country; now that they were there he seldom spoke. How young she seems to me now – half twenty-eight in perception and feeling, but with a husband, a child, a house, a life, an illiterate maid from the village whose life she confidently interfered with and mismanaged, a small zoo of animals she alternately cherished and forgot; and she was the daughter of such a sensible, truthful, pessimistic woman – pessimistic in the way women become when they settle for what actually exists.
Our rooms were not Russian – they were aired every day and the salt became a great nuisance, blowing in on the floor.
“There, Charlotte, what did I tell you?” my grandmother said. This grandmother did not care for dreams or for children. If I sensed the first, I had no hint of the latter. Out of decency she kept it quiet, at least in a child’s presence. She had the reputation, shared with a long-vanished nurse named Olivia, of being able to “do anything” with me, which merely meant an ability to provoke from a child behavior convenient for adults. It was she who taught me to eat in the Continental way, with both hands in sight at all times upon the table, and who made me sit at meals with books under my arms so I would learn not to stick out my elbows. I remember having accepted this nonsense from her without a trace of resentment. Like Olivia, she could make the most pointless sort of training seem a natural way of life. (I think that as discipline goes this must be the most dangerous form of all.) She was one of three godparents I had – the important one. It is impossible for me to enter the mind of this agnostic who taught me prayers, who had already shed every remnant of belief when she committed me at the font. I know that she married late and reluctantly; she would have preferred a life of solitude and independence, next to impossible for a woman in her time. She had the positive voice of the born teacher, sharp manners, quick blue eyes, and the square, massive figure common to both lines of her ancestry – the West of France, the North of Germany. When she said “There, Charlotte, what did I tell you?” without obtaining an answer, it summed up mother and daughter both.
My father’s friend Malcolm Whitmore was the second godparent. He quarrelled with my mother when she said something flippant about Mussolini, disappeared, died in Europe some years later, though perhaps not fighting for Franco, as my mother had it. She often rewrote other people’s lives, providing them with suitable and harmonious endings. In her version of events you were supposed to die as you’d lived. He would write sometimes, asking me, “Have you been confirmed yet?” He had never really held a place and could not by dying leave a gap. The third godparent was a young woman named Georgie Henderson. She was my mother’s choice, for a long time her confidante, partisan, and close sympathizer. Something happened, and they stopped seeing each other. Georgie wa
s not her real name – it was Edna May. One of the reasons she had fallen out with my mother was that I had not been called Edna May too. Apparently, this had been promised.
Without saying where we were going, my father took me along to visit Georgie one Saturday afternoon.
“You didn’t say you were bringing Linnet” was how she greeted him. We stood in the passage of a long, hot, high-ceilinged apartment, treading snow water into the rug.
He said, “Well, she is your godchild, and she has been ill.”
My godmother shut the front door and leaned her back against it. It is in this surprisingly dramatic pose that I recall her. It would be unfair to repeat what I think I saw then, for she and I were to meet again once, only once, many years after this, and I might substitute a lined face for a smooth one and tough, large-knuckled hands for fingers that may have been delicate. One has to allow elbowroom in the account of a rival: “She must have had something” is how it generally goes, long after the initial “What can he see in her? He must be deaf and blind.” Georgie, explained by my mother as being the natural daughter of Sarah Bernhardt and a stork, is only a shadow, a tracing, with long arms and legs and one of those slightly puggy faces with pulled-up eyes.
Her voice remains – the husky Virginia-tobacco whisper I associate with so many women of that generation, my parents’ friends; it must have come of age in English Montreal around 1920, when girls began to cut their hair and to smoke. In middle life the voice would slide from low to harsh, and develop a chronic cough. For the moment it was fascinating to me – opposite in pitch and speed from my mother’s, which was slightly too high and apt to break off, like that of a singer unable to sustain a long note.
It was true that I had been ill, but I don’t think my godmother made much of it that afternoon, other than saying, “It’s all very well to talk about that now, but I was certainly never told much, and as for that doctor, you ought to just hear what Ward thinks.” Out of this whispered jumble my mother stood accused – of many transgressions, certainly, but chiefly of having discarded Dr. Ward Mackey, everyone’s doctor and a family friend. At the time of my birth my mother had all at once decided she liked Ward Mackey better than anyone else and had asked him to choose a name for me. He could not think of one, or, rather, thought of too many, and finally consulted his own mother. She had always longed for a daughter, so that she could call her after the heroine of a novel by, I believe, Marie Corelli. The legend so often repeated to me goes on to tell that when I was seven weeks old my father suddenly asked, “What did you say her name was?”
“Votre fille a frôlé la phtisie,” the new doctor had said, the one who had now replaced Dr. Mackey. The new doctor was known to me as Uncle Raoul, though we were not related. This manner of declaring my brush with consumption was worlds away from Ward Mackey’s “subject to bilious attacks.” Mackey’s objections to Uncle Raoul were neither envious nor personal, for Mackey was the sort of bachelor who could console himself with golf. The Protestant in him truly believed those other doctors to be poorly trained and superstitious, capable of recommending the pulling of teeth to cure tonsillitis, and of letting their patients cough to death or perish from septicemia just through Catholic fatalism.
What parent could fail to gasp and marvel at Uncle Raoul’s announcement? Any but either of mine. My mother could invent and produce better dramas any day; as for my father, his French wasn’t all that good and he had to have it explained. Once he understood that I had grazed the edge of tuberculosis, he made his decision to remove us all to the country, which he had been wanting a reason to do for some time. He was, I think, attempting to isolate his wife, but by taking her out of the city he exposed her to a danger that, being English, he had never dreamed of: this was the heart-stopping cry of the steam train at night, sweeping across a frozen river, clattering on the ties of a wooden bridge. From our separate rooms my mother and I heard the unrivalled summons, the long, urgent, uniquely North American beckoning. She would follow and so would I, but separately, years and desires and destinations apart. I think that women once pledged in such a manner are more steadfast than men.
“Frôler” was the charmed word in that winter’s story; it was a hand brushing the edge of folded silk, a leaf escaping a spiderweb. Being caught in the web would have meant staying in bed day and night in a place even worse than a convent school. Charlotte and Angus, whose lives had once seemed so enchanted, so fortunate and free that I could not imagine lesser persons so much as eating the same kind of toast for breakfast, had to share their lives with me, whether they wanted to or not – thanks to Uncle Raoul, who always supposed me to be their principal delight. I had been standing on one foot for months now, midway between frôler and falling into, propped up by a psychosomatic guardian angel. Of course I could not stand that way forever; inevitably my health improved and before long I was declared out of danger and then restored – to the relief and pleasure of all except the patient.
“I’d like to see more of you than eyes and nose,” said my godmother. “Take off your things.” I offer this as an example of unnecessary instruction. Would anyone over the age of three prepare to spend the afternoon in a stifling room wrapped like a mummy in outdoor clothes? “She’s smaller than she looks,” Georgie remarked, as I began to emerge. This authentic godmother observation drives me to my only refuge, the insistence that she must have had something – he could not have been completely deaf and blind. Divested of hat, scarf, coat, overshoes, and leggings, grasping the handkerchief pressed in my hand so I would not interrupt later by asking for one, responding to my father’s muttered “Fix your hair,” struck by the command because it was he who had told me not to use “fix” in that sense, I was finally able to sit down next to him on a white sofa. My godmother occupied its twin. A low table stood between, bearing a decanter and glasses and a pile of magazines and, of course, Georgie’s ashtrays; I think she smoked even more than my mother did.
On one of these sofas, during an earlier visit with my mother and father, the backs of my dangling feet had left a smudge of shoe polish. It may have been the last occasion when my mother and Georgie were ever together. Directed to stop humming and kicking, and perhaps bored with the conversation in which I was not expected to join, I had soon started up again.
“It doesn’t matter,” my godmother said, though you could tell she minded.
“Sit up,” my father said to me.
“I am sitting up. What do you think I’m doing?” This was not answering but answering back; it is not an expression I ever heard from my father, but I am certain it stood like a stalled truck in Georgie’s mind. She wore the look people put on when they are thinking, Now what are you spineless parents going to do about that?
“Oh, for God’s sake, she’s only a child,” said my mother, as though that had ever been an excuse for anything.
Soon after the sofa-kicking incident she and Georgie moved into the hibernation known as “not speaking.” This, the lingering condition of half my mother’s friendships, usually followed her having said the very thing no one wanted to hear, such as “Who wants to be called Edna May, anyway?”
Once more in the hot pale room where there was nothing to do and nothing for children, I offended my godmother again, by pretending I had never seen her before. The spot I had kicked was pointed out to me, though, owing to new slipcovers, real evidence was missing. My father was proud of my quite surprising memory, of its long backward reach and the minutiae of detail I could describe. My failure now to shine in a domain where I was naturally gifted, that did not require lessons or create litter and noise, must have annoyed him. I also see that my guileless-seeming needling of my godmother was a close adaptation of how my mother could be, and I attribute it to a child’s instinctive loyalty to the absent one. Giving me up, my godmother placed a silver dish of mint wafers where I could reach them – white, pink, and green, overlapping – and suggested I look at a magazine. Whatever the magazine was, I had probably seen it, for my mother
subscribed to everything then. I may have turned the pages anyway, in case at home something had been censored for children. I felt and am certain I have not invented Georgie’s disappointment at not seeing Angus alone. She disliked Charlotte now, and so I supposed he came to call by himself, having no quarrel of his own; he was still close to the slighted Ward Mackey.
My father and Georgie talked for a while – she using people’s initials instead of their names, which my mother would not have done – and they drank what must have been sherry, if I think of the shape of the decanter. Then we left and went down to the street in a wood-panelled elevator that had sconce lights, as in a room. The end of the afternoon had a particular shade of color then, which is not tinted by distance or enhancement but has to do with how streets were lighted. Lamps were still gas, and their soft gradual blooming at dusk made the sky turn a peacock blue that slowly deepened to marine, then indigo. This uneven light falling in blurred pools gave the snow it touched a quality of phosphorescence, beyond which were night shadows in which no one lurked. There were few cars, little sound. A fresh snowfall would lie in the streets in a way that seemed natural. Sidewalks were dangerous, casually sanded; even on busy streets you found traces of the icy slides children’s feet had made. The reddish brown of the stone houses, the curve and slope of the streets, the constantly changing sky were satisfactory in a way that I now realize must have been aesthetically comfortable. This is what I saw when I read “city” in a book; I had no means of knowing that “city” one day would also mean drab, filthy, flat, or that city blocks could turn into dull squares without mystery.
We crossed Sherbrooke Street, starting down to catch our train. My father walked everywhere in all weathers. Already mined, colonized by an enemy prepared to destroy what it fed on, fighting it with every wrong weapon, squandering strength he should have been storing, stifling pain in silence rather than speaking up while there might have been time, he gave an impression of sternness that was a shield against suffering. One day we heard a mob roaring four syllables over and over, and we turned and went down a different street. That sound was starkly terrifying, something a child might liken to the baying of wolves.
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