“There was a hot meal waiting for us that night but I said I wasn’t hungry and only wanted some soup. Stephanie paid no attention at all and after the soup she asked my father to cut me a really big slice of the roast beef. I only ate it to please her, but it made me feel better afterwards. All the time we were eating, the Old Man kept telling stories that were very corny; you know, trying to impress Stephanie. I could see he had an eye for her but of course he was very correct. Being correct ran in that family, and Stephanie made a very big thing out of it and always called him Uncle Greg and that stuff. He was really the big deal, my Old Man. He and the rest of his brothers had all started well-heeled, but the Old Man kept heeling himself better all the time and he really creamed the soup. It used to embarrass me how insensitive he was. You’d have thought he’d have been ashamed having Stephanie there in that house where she was born, working like a nanny looking after a snot-nosed kid like me, but he probably thought he was doing her a favor because her parents were poor and she could use a little extra dough. He used to make a very big deal about how he had come to the rescue when old Uncle John went broke. ‘Rallied around’ was how he put it. I can just hear him. ‘Somebody’s got to rally around to help old John.’ Fuck! At that time money was real and land was dirt cheap. The Old Man knew he was buying a gilt-edged investment for practically nothing. By the time the war was over that house was worth three times what he’d paid for it and ten years later it was worth ten times more.”
In some of the other papers, Timothy said that the house declined in value later on account of some political troubles, but everything about money was crazy by the time I’d grown up. Nobody knew from year to year what it was going to be worth. But let Timothy continue:
“After dinner Stephanie put me to bed and told me stories and when I still couldn’t sleep she sat beside me and stroked my forehead and the back of my neck with the loving patience Florence Nightingale was supposed to have had but probably didn’t. When I woke up next morning she was fully dressed and the first thing I saw was her smile. I haven’t got over it yet. Apparently old Stephanie really wanted to see me with my eyes open. I can’t remember ever seeing my own mother smile at me like that. Maybe she did sometimes and I’ve forgotten, but I saw about fifteen times more of Nanny than I ever saw of my mother and Nanny was just an English woman with big red hands who was paid to do a job. But it was really great the way Stephanie made me feel. I didn’t want her for a mother because I couldn’t stand the idea of a mother just then, but I did think it would be wonderful to wake up next morning and be twenty-five years old.
“But there was one thing the matter with Stephanie that I can tell you was the matter with my whole God-damned family, every one of them. They never told you in words a lot of things you needed to know if it made anyone else in the family look bad in consequence. What I needed to know most of all was how my mother could have stayed married to my Old Man for so long when she couldn’t stand him. All I got out of Stephanie was that Mummy and Daddy had decided it was best for everyone if they lived separately and that we weren’t to talk about it. I wanted her to admit to me what a bastard the Old Man was and what a bitch my mother was. It would have made me feel a lot better if she had done that. It would have made me feel less alone and peculiar and as if everything was somehow my own fault. All of them were supposed to front for each other like the Three Musketeers. The worst crime you could commit in that family – I mean the whole lot and not just this half-assed little end of it I belonged to – the very worst crime was to say anything even reasonably critical about anyone connected with the family.
“Let me give you an example of what I mean. There was that time when Stephanie brought over one of those dozens of cousins of mine to play with me. He was the same age I was, his name was Algie, and his mother came from some place in England. Now anyone could tell just by looking at him that Algie was a pain in the ass. He was a little red-haired kid and he kept talking all the time in that accent of his about what great people his mother’s family in England were, how one of them had been a Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports four or five hundred years ago, so after he went home I told Stephanie that these Cinque Ports couldn’t be such a big deal if they’d ended up in a jerk like Algie. There was hell to pay. Stephanie gave me one of those looks she was so good at and I felt I ought to be crawling under stones. Then she really gave it to me about the way I talked. Just like the worst kind of American, she said. ‘If you keep on using “big deal” for everything as well as all the other bad language and calling your cousins jerks, you’ll soon be known as the most horrible child in Montreal.’ It took me a month before I stopped doing it and even then I only stopped when she or the Old Man were around.
“But what I’m trying to say here is that Stephanie was really a lovely person and she had a beautiful speaking voice. The whole town knew the Wellfleets were old-fashioned. I mean, the sons all went to RMC and the girls came out at two or three thousand a throw, but Stephanie was old-fashioned in a nice way. All the women in the family were supposed to have beautiful manners and I guess they really did have them if you liked Jane Austen, but Stephanie’s manners were actually kind. I mean, she never tried to produce an effect with them the result of which is only to make the other guy feel lousy. It wasn’t Stephanie’s fault that her father disapproved so much of the twentieth century that he never could get along in it and got royally screwed in consequence.”
When I read this I couldn’t help smiling. Whatever else he may not have been, Timothy was a pretty shrewd observer. I knew all about that look Mother could give you and I’m pretty sure Uncle Conrad knew about it, too. Timothy, by the way, wrote this passage when he was sixteen. His style matured somewhat later on.
What happened to him next was bound to have been routine. When that year ended he was sent off to an expensive boarding school in Ontario and my mother returned to the four-room apartment she shared with her parents. By that time her own mother was bedridden and had only two more years left.
Timothy continued to brood over what had gone wrong between his parents and it was at the boarding school that he found out, or thought he found out, why he had no mother any more.
There was a boy a year older called Scrivener whom Timothy admired who told him that much the same thing had happened to himself, the difference being that he was in his mother’s custody while Timothy was in his father’s. This Scrivener, whom Timothy described as “cool,” explained that when the soldiers were overseas they screwed every woman they could lay their hands on (Timothy’s words) and Scrivener said he had it all worked out. Say at any given time there were three hundred thousand Canadian soldiers and airmen in England, allow an average of ten different women to each man, and that meant about three million women, which Scrivener said “was a hell of a lot of screwing.” He also said it was one of those things that gets to be a habit like booze and cigarettes. His own mother had remained faithful and that was why he was in her custody and now his father was married to a much younger woman. He explained to Timothy that what had happened in his case was that his mother had been screwing around the town while her husband was away and that the Old Man had found out about it. When Timothy asked if this meant that his father had had no women when overseas, he was told to grow up.
“For your Old Man it couldn’t have been cozier,” Scrivener said. “He looks good and your mother looks bad. Pretty soon, you watch. He’ll marry a young girl just like my own Old Man did.”
So it was no surprise to Timothy when the house master called him out of prep one night and said his father was on the phone from Montreal. As his father had never phoned him before, Timothy was pretty sure of what he would say and he said it. Timothy had a new mother who was very beautiful and, as Timothy put it, “the old bastard began by practically ordering me to love her sight unseen.” They were off for a short honeymoon to the Caribbean but would be back in time for the Easter holidays. Then his stepmother came onto the line and told him how wonderful it all
was and that she was beginning to love him already. Predictably, Timothy concluded this episode with the observation that he wanted to throw up.
There was an American book called The Catcher in the Rye which was a Bible for the kids of Timothy’s age and it’s impossible for me to know how much of his early vocabulary was derived from it or to what extent it crystallized his attitudes. This novel was one of those universal things for its time and place, but after I lent my own battered old copy to André, he said he couldn’t make head or tail out of it.
When Timothy came home for Easter, he found his father and stepmother with their skins as tan as Hindus and according to him it was “God-damned indecent how they behaved in my presence. The old rut couldn’t keep his paws off her even with me there in the room.” She was twenty-one to his forty-two and Timothy thought it “neat” that he was actually double her age and even neater that she was exactly half of his. She was about the same size as his own mother with the same kind of blonde hair and blue eyes. He noted also that her mouth could be pretty petulant at times if she felt like it, and to this he added that “she had as beautiful a body as any man could hope to get his hands on, but what was the good of that if you had to look at the vacuousness of her face?” Though he did not know it at the time, she was already pregnant.
Looking back on those years from my present place in time, I think I’m right in saying that it was seldom as tense for my age group as it was for Timothy’s. Many of our parents had divorces, but there was not so much guilt in the air. Now once more I can let Timothy continue, mentioning that this and anything else he wrote in this story was written when he was much older, indeed after he became famous.
“If there are any historians around in the next century, even if they are only computers, I wonder what they are going to say about those years when we were told we had never had it so good, when the cities grew like cancers and their skies went tan with sulfur dioxide and winter snows looked like coal in March and young people were conned into instant marriages and instant families? The deterioration of my father was all the evidence I needed to understand what the System was doing to everybody. He talked, acted, ate, drank, and took his routine southern holidays like everyone else he knew, and whatever had been unique in him – and now I know that much had been unique – slowly died from spiritual malnutrition. Of course, on the surface he was a success story, which meant that he was a classic failure story. Anyone who began those years with a solid backlog of capital would have had to be a moron if he didn’t treble it inside ten years, and in business my father had the instinct. During the first years of his second marriage he and my stepmother produced five children, two boys and three girls, until my stepmother, looking drained but always bright and pert, already dyeing her ash-blonde hair, declared that five were enough.
“I used to wonder if by then she had come to hate him without having the brains to know that she did. When she married him his muscles were iron-hard from the war, his lungs were still cleansed by fresh air, and his dark hair included just enough gray to make him look like the first prize to a girl who thought South Pacific was the greatest show on earth. Now his hair was a dull uniform gray, his breath was short, and his waist was getting thick, and what had she to show for the great adventure but the sagging flesh of overstretched abdominal muscles which had gone soft after doing their work. But can you believe it? That woman never missed a chance to tell her friends how happy she was, even when her face wore that look of blank resentment you see on the faces of women who feel they have been cheated of the best years of their lives. My father was a prime mesomorph, as I am not. I read somewhere that a lot of mesomorphs lose interest and conk out sexually long before some skinny guy is still raring to go.
“This may explain why my father, in my eighteenth year, at last began to take an interest in me. He even tried to talk to me about the war, but it was so much a part of his code to underplay anything connected with bravery that it took all my imagination to translate into even a quarter-reality what he said. He was bursting with life in the war. There was also the time when he reminisced about pre-war Montreal, and when he talked about it he never mentioned the French except to say how much he liked them. He was sincere about that. He was also sincere, in the sense that he believed it, when he said that the French Canadians would far sooner work for an English boss than for one of their own people, and it never crossed his mind how arrogant he was even though quite possibly he was telling the truth.
“But one thing his class certainly had and it was physical courage. They didn’t scare worth a damn. Nearly all of them went to the war and it was not from Father but from one of his junior officers that I learned how he won his Military Cross. He stormed across a causeway in the Dutch polders ahead of a platoon of volunteers with the bullets cracking past his ears, all the time bellowing some crazy song in the voice of a berserk bull until at last he drowned it in the roar of his Sten gun when he and his men took the position.
“He was not alive like this any more, though his doctor pronounced his health to be sound. Now that he seemed to have some interest in me I tried to be fair to him and even asked myself whether he had really been faithful to my mother when he was overseas. In the strict technical sense it wouldn’t have been practical for him never to have touched a woman all those years he was away. That wouldn’t have meant he was unfaithful to her, not in any sense that a sane woman could hold against him. Now I think he quite possibly was faithful to her. Now I think the poor dumb guy really had idealized her. I think he got the shock of his life when he came home and found out what had been going on while he was away. I was pretty crummy when I was a kid and I should have seen one very plain fact. It wasn’t Father that kicked her out of his life, it was my mother who kicked him out of hers. And at least he valued me enough to fight for me against her.”
Another passage from Timothy may explain why there was at least a little truth in the Diagram; that it actually was about this time that the System began to crack up. Whatever you may think of Timothy’s character, he was certainly observant and sensitive. Listen to this:
“Hardly anyone could be alive in those years even if he thought he was with it a hundred percent of the way. The System simply did not let you be a human being unless you were content to live like a bum. How could anyone be a human being in that decade of the spiritual castrati programmed by Dr. Spock, interpreted by the interpreters of Dr. Freud, its religion packaged in cellophane by Doctors Peale, Sheen, and Graham, the whole lot of them conned into believing, into really believing, that nobody in the history of this world had had it so good as us? I can see them. Not my father but the ones who came along just after the war – I can see them in their white shirts, their thin ties, their charcoal suits, their crew cuts, playing it cool, oh, but so suave and cool, expressing their rages in calculated smiles and really believing that if they failed to win friends and influence people to put money into their pockets they didn’t qualify for the Prosperity Club. A shout of real fury? The explosion of a good old-fashioned belly laugh? It was like farting in Eisenhower’s face.
“I was sad for my father, I really was. In those years he tried to do his best for me, but all the time I was watching him grow older, lonelier, and emptier. Perhaps he was too old for those children of his second marriage. Perhaps they were too young for him. Maybe it was even simpler. The poor old bastard who could be so brave in battle and so shrewd in business, who was genuinely good-natured as I later had to admit – did he really believe all the big lies of his time and place? Somehow I don’t think he did. Or maybe when he came back from the war and the big boom took over, maybe he just didn’t notice what it was leading to and got hooked and couldn’t get off the line. In the end I think he was simply worn down by the changes in everything he had known. I can see now that he would have made an excellent father if he had been born fifty years earlier, because fifty years earlier the things he believed in would not have been lies. He was not without honor, and I say this with en
vy because honor is something I have never had.
“Yes, he was insensitive. He just didn’t know any better. As, for example, that carefully studied expression (was it sly or only embarrassed?) when he’d suggest that I take one of the cars and go north ‘with some nice girl,’ which was his way of letting me know that he accepted the moral shift which allowed that a girl could be a nice girl if she went to bed with a man she hadn’t married. Or when he pressed me with handouts of money I hadn’t earned so that I felt ashamed when I accepted them. He seemed to be trying to make up to me for things he was quite intelligent enough to know I had missed, but money wasn’t the way to do it. Why could he never understand that the last thing I needed from him was any kind of indulgence and the one thing I inwardly craved was the kind of leadership he had given his men at Walcheren? I would look at my stepmother, that cheated child, and at the smallest of the new children playing on the floor, and Father would notice my expression and then he would look down, deep down, into his drink.
“I had no ambition because I honestly did not know where I was, so I accepted a place in the plastic paradise-penitentiary our upper middle class had imported from south of the border and paid for by selling out all those billions of dollars’ worth of the national resources. I got my so-called education in it. I got my job in it. I married in it. I sired two children in it, and slowly I was dying in it.
“Then suddenly, when I was thirty years old, I believed I had been reborn. I thought I had become an entirely new kind of man. But how many ex-cons ever get over what the jail has done to them?
“Anyway, it is with this so-called new man that my story proper begins. I try to look back on him as though he were a stranger, as though he were not me at all, for when I recall what I was like in those days my grief and shame are almost more than I can bear. Perhaps if I had possessed the talent to cut absolutely free and to become absolutely poor I would never have done some of the things I did. But instead I became famous for a while and made a lot of money.
Voices in Time Page 8
