Voices in Time

by Hugh Maclennan

  “Because I’ve got my own sources and they didn’t come from a library.”

  Esther smiled shyly. “Darling, you’re tired right out, and no wonder. Why don’t you let me take the program tonight?”

  “Are you telling me I’m washed up? Well, let me tell you that I could bring anything alive tonight. And with those two dummies this show will need a rocket booster.”

  She bit her lip and turned away. Timothy noted later that if she had said nothing more he would have agreed to let her take over. But she did say something more.

  “Lately older men – especially if they’re dignified, distinguished men – they’ve been doing something to you that isn’t good. You behave to them as though they’re a bad smell in your nose. So please be careful tonight. That Chalifour is sure to be abrasive. Don’t bait him into putting Professor Dehmel into danger.”

  Timothy came erect and looked straight at her. “This man Dehmel you think you know so much about – I happen to know he’s an ex-Nazi and a racist.”

  Her face went white. “Where did you pick up that morsel?”

  “I told you I had my sources.”

  “What source told you a thing like that?”

  “Jason Ross – you remember Jason Ross, don’t you?”

  “That miserable little –”

  “Come off it, Esther. Jason Ross is the most powerful student in the city, probably in the country.”

  “The most powerful student! Don’t make me laugh.”

  “He’s scared the administration pissless. And he’s a good performer. You know yourself how good he is. We’ve had him here three times and he really socked it to them. He had his suspicions of Dehmel – he’s got really good sources. He was born in Europe and he signed up for two of Dehmel’s courses just to verify what he’d been told about him. He’s an operator, Ross is. He gave me the real goods on this professor of yours.”

  In a voice frigid with contempt, she said, “Next time you’re in the mood to get yourself conned by a phony like this Ross, you talk first with a real Jew. This Ross we can do without. A few more like him and there’ll be people talking about pogroms. After I’d talked with Ross for five minutes I needed a bath.”

  She left him and he recorded later that her eyes had the same expression he had seen in the eyes of his wife when she had made up her mind to divorce him. He sank his head into his forearms and nearly sobbed, but he had a kind of desperate toughness that usually saved him from collapse and soon he straightened his shoulders and steadied his breathing. He opened a drawer in his filing cabinet and took out a piece of paper, glanced at it, then folded it and put it into the side pocket of his jacket. He recorded that he said aloud, “It seems that King Richard is himself again, and in more ways than one.”

  EIGHT

  Before I began writing this history I told André Gervais that the handling of time was going to be very difficult. This material has come to me from so many segments of time, some of which I never lived in myself. Even Timothy’s material comes from different segments.

  I have told you how it was for him when he was a child and quite a lot about him when he was at the height of his television career. André was informed by the Diagram that the crack-up occurred when I was in my late twenties. But did it? My own idea is that it began with Timothy’s crowd, and Timothy was twenty years older than me. His age group was greatly disliked by ours, especially after they began copying the way we dressed and poached on our girls. We called them “the thirty-year-olders.” I think now that we were as unfair to them as they were to the generation above them. We simply did not understand how much baloney had been jammed down their throats. As Timothy put it, “Instant marriage, instant family, instant coffee, instant jobs, and a trained consumer for the rest of your life.” The programming of their ideas was changed as smoothly as the gears in the automatic transmissions of the automobiles of the time. No wonder poor old Timothy raved so frantically against the System. And with this clumsy introduction, I must ask you to bear with a short interlude while I take you back to what Timothy called “Those stone-dead years when I was doing my best to be like everyone else.”

  Before leaving school, in a craving to please his father and make him his friend, Timothy decided that he wanted to go to the Royal Military College instead of to a regular university. Nothing he ever did made his father so happy. Colonel Wellfleet had himself been an RMC man; so had his own father, one of his brothers, and two of his uncles in that older time when RMC was the prime stamping ground of the Anglophone establishment, its traditions and even its uniform straight out of nineteenth-century Sandhurst, most of its instructors burly, mustachioed ex-sergeants of famous English Guards regiments. Timothy spent two years there.

  At times he could be fair even to people he disliked, and he admitted that the RMC he attended was not particularly exclusive, that the cadets really did come from what the Commandant called “every walk of life,” and that the navy and the air force were there in addition to the army. But the very thought of anyone like Timothy in a military college ridicules itself.

  When his third year lapsed around he told his father that all he had learned at RMC was to keep a tidy room and a straight back. Later on it mortified him to know that the sergeants had trained his reflexes so thoroughly that he could never get over the habit of sitting and standing like a soldier.

  When he told his father he intended to drop out of RMC he expected an explosion, but Colonel Wellfleet merely seemed lonely and sad. What was the matter with RMC – had it fallen off? Timothy said there was nothing the matter with it if you liked the army.

  “But you’ve known all along that RMC doesn’t commit you to a military career. It’s a training for almost anything.”

  “Oh sure, it’s a training all right. Look at my shoulders.”

  His father rubbed his chin, glanced at his watch, and picked up the phone.

  “I’m going to have a word with your Commandant. He and I did a spell in Staff College in the early days of the war.”

  Timothy sat still and erect during the conversation that followed over the telephone. Finally his father nodded and said, “Thanks, Cuffy, for being so frank with me. Next time you’re in town give me a buzz and we’ll have lunch and a splash together.” He hung up, relit his pipe, puffed on it thoughtfully, and between puffs went into a soliloquy.

  The Commandant had agreed that RMC was not the right place for the boy. Timothy had made no trouble, in fact he had put out a real effort, but he just wasn’t the type. A long puff and a cloud of fragrant smoke from the imported Erinmore.

  “I’d hoped it wouldn’t come to this,” the Colonel said finally, “but I’m afraid it has. You’ve become a problem.”

  A bank? No, that would never suit him. Another puff. What about investments? A long pause.

  “From your expression I gather you’re against investments, but you never know in advance about investments. I suggest that you take an aptitude test. Sometimes the most unlikely people turn out to be good at investments. I knew a man who wasted ten years of his life trying to be a painter. It took him all that long to find out he had no talent. Then he took an aptitude test and the test pointed to investments. Do you know what? That man astonished everyone, including himself. Inside five years he was a millionaire.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “Dead, I’m sorry to say. As a matter of fact he committed suicide. Nobody ever understood why. He seemed to have a happy family. Nice wife and two splendid young sons. Queer things happen these days.”

  “Father,” said Timothy, “I don’t think I want to go into investments.”

  His father sighed. “Something tells me you’re right.”

  The Colonel continued to think aloud. Insurance? He shook his head. Real estate? There was a strong gambling element there and it could be stimulating but – “No, you haven’t the instinct. I’ve seen you play cards. Any ideas of your own?”

  “I’d been thinking of becoming a teacher.”
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  “The last refuge of the undecided,” said the Colonel. Then once more he surprised Timothy. “But hold on a moment. There might be a great deal in that idea. One of the most successful men this city ever knew began as a schoolmaster and he taught tough subjects – Latin and Greek. He told my father something that made a great impression on me. Six years with schoolboys had taught him two priceless lessons, he said. First, he always knew when someone was lying. Secondly, he discovered that boys are just like grown men most of the time and that it was from boys that he learned what most people really want. So there you have two things – to recognize when people are lying and to know what they really want – especially if they’re ashamed of what they want.” The Colonel was warming to the idea. “And here’s another consideration. These days teachers are being paid much more than they used to be paid. More than most of them are worth, in my opinion. But if that’s what you want, give it a crack.” A longer pause. “But of course you know yourself there’s another problem here. You’ll have to go to a university first. That will mean you’ve already wasted two years.” He shrugged. “Oh well, what difference need that make? I lost more than five years in the war.”

  So the Colonel staked his son and Timothy enrolled for joint honors in Sociology and Political Science, which were prestige subjects in those days. He acquainted himself with a variety of girls, most of them of his own social class, and in his final year he fixed on a plump, rosy-cheeked blonde called Enid. Subsequently he found it “dismally funny the kind of ethics we used to have.” Apparently the young people of his class were frank with each other verbally, if frank in few other ways. “I was too dumb then to know that Enid was even dumber. She had the hang-up, all right. She’d love to sleep with me – sleep, for God’s sake! – but only if we first announced our engagement. So like a bloody fool I got publicly engaged for no better reason than that I was crazy for a regular lay.”

  But Timothy’s father was delighted, because Enid’s parents were old family friends. Marriage made it essential for Timothy to get a job even though his father was happy to stake the happy couple, but Greg Wellfleet was looking toward the future. Towards grandchildren and the future of his grandchildren. He therefore told Timothy that he must forget all about schoolteaching and that it was too bad he’d wasted all that time with Sociology and Political Science when he might have been studying Commerce. Once again he invited Timothy into his library and this time he didn’t tell him he was a problem. He said he had the solution, but he took a long time to get around to saying what it was.

  “Then it was that at last I found myself watching Father with a sad wonder. Then it was that I understood what had happened to him. I felt a great pity for Father. He no longer could recognize the world he was living in. He had become an exile in it. Instead of renewing his youth, he had become a well-heeled hangover from an age that had blown itself out. That young wife of his had only accelerated his aging. She was even blinder than he to the real world. I found myself thinking even then – long before I met Esther – what would he have been like if he had possessed the kind of courage to defy the stuffed shirts he had grown up with and marry some lusty immigrant girl who might have laid to rest that mighty animal in his loins and heart? You poor old bastard, I thought, while he was planning my future. The only time you were free to be yourself was in the war. You brave, sad, gallant man. Harnessed to a youthful replica of the poison that began to kill you when you were only twenty-two. Why did you refuse to understand me? Now your wealth is just another burden for your tired, frustrated shoulders to carry. I know a poet who lives with a long succession of girls and has no shame at all. He lets them support him. People swarm after him for his autograph. But you do have honor, and the only autograph anyone wants from you is your signature at the bottom of a check. You brave, sad man. So old before your time when your body and soul yearn to be young. Helping to liberate Holland didn’t liberate you after all, for you came home to that bitch of a mother of mine and then you must have gone into a panic. Now there’s no place for you in a world a-borning because it won’t offer a man like you even a corner of itself to weep in. So here you are, a proved hero, searching the maps and travel agencies for some tropical island where you can escape the taxes and fence yourself in with others as rich and hopeless as yourself.

  “As though I had been reading his thoughts, Father suddenly said, ‘Your stepmother and I have been thinking of settling in Nassau.’ So I said, ‘Don’t do it.’ He said, ‘Why not?’ and looked at me hard. ‘If you go there,’ I said, ‘the blacks will spit on your shadow when you pass.’ And he said, ‘I’ve nothing against the blacks. Why would they do that?’ Then he turned away from me and said, ‘I think I’ve found the solution for your problem.’”

  The solution turned out to be an advertising agency which one of the Colonel’s wartime friends, in fact his Adjutant, had inherited from his own father, who had also been a previous colonel of the regiment. So Timothy started to work in a business house which was respected, self-respecting, and dignified. Mr. Campbell was an obstinate man of high character who believed, and told Timothy at their first meeting, that while it was legitimate for an advertising man to dramatize the products he promoted, he must be as careful of the long-time truth as the editor of a first-class responsible newspaper.

  “All the ads that’s fit to print?” Timothy suggested.

  Mr. Campbell gave him a stern glance to indicate that he did not appreciate flippant young men.

  Looking back, Timothy marvelled that Mr. Campbell lasted as long as he did, for “His ethics were frozen in the prewar days when Canada was a dull and on the whole honest country with a dollar worth a hundred cents instead of twenty-five and when it was fatal to oversell anything from a detergent to a politician.” When Mr. Campbell reached the end of his road, a bright young account executive smilingly described him as a time-adjustment casualty.

  “So was the whole country a time-adjustment casualty, for what happened to it was as swift as a dream-sequence. For twenty years our dreaming capitalists had been selling out their companies to huge American combines which were wide-awake; or rather, the combines had been suavely and systematically engrossing them just as they had engrossed the smaller businesses in their own countries. One of them finally engrossed us. Mr. Campbell was retired with a generous block of the company stock, we became known as Campbell of Canada, Ltd., and just how limited we were we soon found out.

  “Up from Madison Avenue came a thirty-five-year-old product of Phillips Andover and the Harvard Business School to modernize and reorganize us. His name was Melvin K. Goodwillie and it would have been hard to find a friendlier fellow. The moment he met me he said ‘Hi!’ and immediately called us all by our first names, including men twenty years older than himself. Soon he was sending us down in relays to New York to take what he called immersion programs in techniques which were more or less new to us, and there we met men as alert and friendly as Goodwillie himself, including the boss of the whole multinational whose name was Taylor W. Truscott. He also called us by our first names at first sight – silver hair with natural waves in it, a fast smile, a thin mouth, and pale blue eyes so alert to opportunity they could see around corners.”

  Mr. Truscott’s message was that he welcomed this opportunity to expand into Canada because there the advertising industry still retained a dignified image, “and we intend to keep it that way.”

  In order to dignify the image still further, Goodwillie was ordered to move the agency into the most prestigious (according to Timothy, one of Goodwillie’s favorite words) tower in the city. In those days, as well I remember, you could hardly go anywhere without hearing some kind of music, and on the floors where the typists worked, piped-in music whispered softly from nine till five. On the floors where the account executives worked, the carpeting went from wall to wall and the windows from floor to ceiling “so that we could get the right perspective by looking down like Gullivers from thirtyeight floors onto the Lilliputian con
sumers swarming below.” Silk screens depicting rural and mountain scenery in Canada adorned the walls and Goodwillie announced a poetry award of a thousand dollars for annual competition. Finally came the day when Goodwillie buzzed Timothy to come to the executive suite to witness the installation of what he called his pièce de résistance. He was just beginning a crash program in learning French.

  Timothy arrived to see four husky French Canadians with the shoulders of ancient voyageurs manhandling into the suite the biggest Quebec armoire he had ever seen in his life.

  Goodwillie beamed. “Genuine seventeenth century,” he said.

  The wood looked slightly dry-rotted, and when Timothy touched it and examined it closely he realized that it had been deliberately and carefully scorched and then stained.

  “Mel,” he said, “where did you find this eleven-dollar bill?”

  Goodwillie laughed. “No hard feelings, man, but you guys don’t even know your own town. You’ve lived here all your life and you never knew there’s a business on Craig Street that manufactures antiques to order. This piece is perfect Louis Quatorze.”

  The next day Goodwillie summoned Timothy once more. “I just thought you’d like to see it operational. Just watch.”

  He pressed a button on the left side of the antique and out swung a tray bearing iced Coca-Cola, Seven-Up, two tins of tomato juice, six uniform glasses, and a bottle opener.

  “Pour l’heure du cocktail. I had a small refrigerator installed inside of it. From now on, we hold our business luncheons in the executive suite.” Goodwillie grinned. “Of course, this tray is for abstainers. You always have to watch out for them. More than one account’s been lost by offering a drink to a dry.” Pressing a button on the right side he said, “This is for real.” Out swung a much larger tray bearing gin, vodka, Scotch, rye, and mixed martinis, also soda and tonic waters, eight glasses of varying shapes and sizes, and another bottle opener.