Montreal Stories
Page 26
“Let me show you where the Cuban used to hold concerts of chamber music for his guests,” I said, guiding Carlotta a few steps toward a bleak terrace surrounded by a broken balustrade patched with concrete.
“Is this old?”
“Some of it. Try and imagine the music, the moonlight, the stiff wind that rises at about ten o’clock, the audience quietly freezing on their gilt chairs. Vladimir de Pachmann played here. He was a great favorite at that time.”
“What did he play?”
“He played Chopin on a grand piano, and every so often he stopped playing and cried.”
“We listen to a lot of music at home. My mother likes it.”
“I know. It used to be music with meals. I can never see a lamb chop without hearing Mozart.”
“You shouldn’t get into those habits—looking at a chop and thinking about Mozart. It comes from living alone.” Strangers had joined us, believing the terrace must be part of a tour. “Steve,” said Carlotta. “Let’s go. The sun’s very hot. You ought to have a hat on.”
On the road she made me walk in shade. The other pair had disappeared. Victor was probably making his pitch about turning our small community into a contemporary instrument for living, once we’d accepted generous compensation. At least the two were safe from prying, if not from each other. Seeing the worst ahead for them did not make me feel on high ground. I held Carlotta’s arm for a second. She said, “Why don’t you buy a car and just leave it here? It would be cheaper than renting one.”
“I’m here only a few weeks a year.”
“Like, how many?”
“Three, four. Sometimes six. It depends. I’m wondering where to take you to lunch.”
“It’s really nice of you,” she said.
“To think about lunch?”
“Yes, and to show me all these different things, and take the time to explain. A lot of men wouldn’t be bothered.”
“I’m sure most of them would,” I said, to round off the subject.
“Mmm. Ya. Men.” From Lily’s daughter, three profound philosophical statements; but she was Ken Peel’s child, too.
The last time I ever saw Ken Peel was on a June afternoon, just before Lily and I got married and sailed to France. He stood on the threshold of his sporting-goods store, hands in his pockets, rocking slightly in his white-and-tan shoes, sniffing the air of downtown Montreal. I was walking west along St. Catherine Street, on my way to see an Italian movie the Church was trying to have banned in Quebec. I could make out the hand-lettered sign Peel hung on the door when he had better things to do than sell gym kits: “BACH IN 20 MIN.” (Either that sign announced a perpetually postponed concert, my aunt once said, or it showed Mr. Peel was careless about everything.)
I supposed he must have been seeing off one of his married women friends: such was his reputation. At that moment the wife of a titled Austrian exile, or a jailed union leader, or a night-club waiter (there was no bias to his adventures) might be combing her hair in a taxi, trying to pull together a credible story about the way she’d spent the afternoon. Perhaps she was one of the stiff, tough, powdered Anglo-Montreal women I encountered at cocktail parties when I was roped in as escort for my aunt. I could see her, Peel’s petite dame, surveying the room with slightly pouched eyes, hand clamped on a gin-and-tonic, thin line of scarlet lipstick, one of the famous Montreal hats sitting square, no one at the party even close to guessing she had recently been treated with some insolence on Peel’s storage-room couch.
Peel, face tilted, smiling at the sky, might have recognized me as an occasional customer. I had never paid by check, so he had no reason to remember my name. I have probably altered my recollection of that moment, changed its shape, refined it, as I still sometimes will tinker with shreds of a dream. It seems to me that I drew level with the store window, then turned and bolted across the street. I think that I saw, or was given to see, with a dream’s narrowed focus, a black-and-white postcard image of Lily on the edge of Peel’s couch, drawing on a stocking. For the first time I noticed how much she resembled the young Marlene, the Weimar Dietrich: the same half-shut eyes, the same dreamy and invulnerable gaze. She slid into the stocking, one perfect leg outstretched, the other bent and bare.
Actually, Lily was already dressed, waiting in the shadow of the store for Peel to give her the all-clear. She moved nearer the hot, bright street, and must have observed me, dodging behind a streetcar. I think I glanced back; either that or a whole city block swung round. Lily, wearing a hat of white straw and a white dress amazingly uncrumpled, slid past Peel and ran straight into traffic, calling, “Steve! Steve!” Peel took his hands out of his pockets; perhaps his way of showing surprise. I think now (I have been thinking it over for years) that she saw me turn round, and knew I knew. So, better to brazen it out.
I slowed down, stopped, examined a display of garden furniture in a store window. She ran on tiptoe, shuffling, the way women used to run in spike heels; caught up; grabbed me by the sleeve. Part of my mind had fallen into darkness. I could not recall having ever loved her. The Dietrich-like image dissolved, was replaced by one of Ken Peel, in heightened tones, wearing the trusting smile of the natural con artist. That face was the stamp of his Montreal generation, distributed unevenly among all ranks and classes of English-speaking males, as luck is thinly or thickly spread.
My next immediate feeling was snobbish relief that Peel was nobody’s friend, and the incident could be contained. But then it occurred to me that the people I knew had already come to some conclusion about Lily. A girl who could glide out of the late-afternoon shadows of Peel’s place had the habit of dark doorways.
Her hand rested lightly on my arm. She explained what she was doing on St. Catherine Street—buying a birthday present. (I was about to be twenty-four.) “A new tennis racquet,” she said—the last thing in the world I needed just then.
We went to the movie, and I appraised the nervous, then confident way she held my hand. She must have been saying to herself, “I was wrong. He doesn’t know.” Until today we had read each other’s thoughts. Telepathic marvels, unmatched coincidences fed our conversation. Now the flow of one mind into another seemed to me unhealthy, unwise. I prayed never to stand revealed to anyone again. The film was about a pregnant woman in an Italian village who believes she has been seduced by a messenger from Heaven. Lily had a lapsed Catholic’s glibness on such matters, and did not bother to lower her voice. The cinema was nearly empty, so that her remarks carried. First a woman said, “Would you mind?,” then a man called, “Ah, shut your face!”
We left and walked along to a German restaurant called The Old Mill, and had beer and Wiener schnitzels. The film had reminded Lily of the boarding school, accursed and despised, to which Old Lady Quale had consigned her when she was trying to get Lily away from boys; specifically, from me. I knew most of the stories, but I let her talk. She looked past me, with the soft bright stare that took in everything.
Why didn’t I challenge her? Because she might have lied, accused me of being jealous, of following her all round the city, always trying to catch her out. She might swear she had never been inside Peel’s store; rather, only once, to inquire about racquets. I had no method, no system, for coming to terms with Lily. My aunt never lied—she had never been frightened—and my parents lived in a barren climate of the truth at any cost. Lily occupied a terrain more lush and changeable, but she had been brought up by dangerous people.
I began to wonder if I could be sure. Perhaps she had been walking by, had happened to glance in the shopwindow, seen the very thing, stepped inside to have a word with Mr. Peel. She was nothing to Peel except Miss L. Quale, secretary to a dentist in the Medical Arts Building. I had to ask myself if I wanted to live with Lily or without her: I had always been with Lily. When I was much younger, had won prizes, had my looks compared to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s, I had studied my face, without vanity, wondering if my overpraised and temperate character held some other essence—more charming, more
devious, even weak. In my aunt’s copy of “All the Sad Young Men” I had found an underscored passage about the end of love, the end of April; never the same love twice; “let it pass.” My aunt must have recognized her own stoic yearning for my late uncle, young Lieut. Cope. I knew nothing about him, except for a sepia studio portrait in First World War uniform.
Lily ate three bites of schnitzel. We traded plates, and I finished it off. She drank a sip of beer, pushed the glass across, took my empty one. I was coming out of darkness, ready to listen to her again. She said how much she owed me, how much she had learned from me. Without me, she would never have known about European movies, Anna Magnani, Vittorio De Sica. She might have been like her own mother—ignorant, bigoted, probably mad. I didn’t answer. I think she believed it: I know at the time I thought it was true.
We were married in Christ Church Cathedral, east of where the European cinema and the German restaurant and Peel’s old store used to be. All effaced; never replaced. The Quales would not attend the wedding, because it was in an Anglican church. My parents sent a letter from China and managed to congratulate me without mentioning Lily. (The Maoists were about to send them packing.) My aunt was there, wearing a great many layers of clothing for the tropical day. All that linen and silk must have been a kind of armor. I had wanted Lily to be given a token of family jewelry. It wasn’t exactly the czarist imperial treasure, but a pin or a ring might have made Lily feel welcome and secure. My aunt did not think such a gesture was required or even sensible; she did not expect the marriage to last. For the same reason, she would have preferred a civil ceremony to all these reckless promises to God, but in Quebec only religious rites were allowed. She kissed Lily on the cheek, then suddenly relented, removed the seed-pearl brooch fastened to her jacket, and pinned it on Lily’s dress.
Lily and I sailed to France on a Polish freighter. The Lapwings were already installed in a Mediterranean hovel, on the most decrepit street of an ancient quarter. An open sewer ran under their windows. Lapwing never noticed; he sat indoors, working out a community of purpose between William Morris and St. Paul that so far had escaped academic notice. In a letter to Lily, Edie had described how their neighbors threw garbage out their windows and stoned stray cats and dogs. She was not complaining but felt relieved to be at last confronted with the real world. The Lapwings did not think we were ready for the kind of life that underlies appearances, and so they had leased for us a more conventional dwelling, close to bus routes. There was a view over the sea. It would cost us eight dollars a month. (The Lapwings were paying six.)
On the second day out Lily curled up and was deathly seasick. Then she seemed to be bleeding to death. The ship’s doctor took me aside and said, “We can call it an accident. Don’t worry. You are young, you can have other children.”
I said, “It’s a mistake.” Lily could not have been pregnant: I had taken the greatest care. I never wanted my aunt to be able to say Lily had trapped me by being cunning and Catholic and fertile. I was not the son of missionaries for nothing: I saw the incident as a clean sweep, the falsehood washed away, the pagan wrenched from old customs, blood sacrifice of the convert—Lily converted to me, entirely.
Though slight of figure, she was very strong. Her health improved quickly. She told me over and again about the life we would have together, and the happiness that would carry us. But I imagined she was thinking, He doesn’t know, and I said to myself, Well, let it pass. In the shack above the sea I heard, “He doesn’t know,” more and more faintly, and Lily must have heard a dying, a fading, a whispering “Let it pass.” She had more sense than any man, so she cut the sound.
IN A WAR
WHEN LILY QUALE was fourteen, stockings were hard to come by, because we were in a war and factories were dressing soldiers. She colored her bare legs with pancake makeup, some of which always rubbed off on the edge of her skirt. Recently she had taken up with a Polish girl, a few years older, twice expelled from convent schools. She taught Lily how to draw a fake seam with eyebrow pencil and explained a few other matters usually left obscure in Catholic Quebec.
Lily’s mother showed a cold face to the girl who knew such a lot. She didn’t think well of me, either, although I knew hardly anything that might interest Lily.
“You and Lily are too big to be natural company for each other now,” her mother said one Saturday afternoon, when Lily and I were sitting in the Quales’ kitchen, on the excuse of doing homework. I was a year ahead, writing an essay on how railways helped the Industrial Revolution, while Lily tried to disentangle the reasons for the American Civil War. We barely knew that Canada had a history. “She ought to be with a girl her own age,” Mrs. Quale went on, “and you, Steve, you’d be better off with another boy. And I don’t want the two of you going upstairs to study in Leo’s room unless I’m in the house.”
That was how adults saw things then: simply. Catholic-Protestant stories, all bad luck, lay strewn around us, the rocks and bricks of separation. Why let anything go too far between two kids who were bound to separate? The town we lived in straggled along both sides of the Châtelroux River. There was no core to the place except a huddle of stores around the French church, with its aluminum-painted roof and spire. The Quales were in bungalow territory, Catholic and English-speaking—everyone’s minority. The last thing they looked for was trouble. My aunt had a house on the opposite shore, facing the river. We had a dock and a rowboat and a canoe. We had French-Canadian neighbors, working a strip farm, and English-Canadian acquaintances living in houses like ours, farther down the road, toward the bridge and railway station. We had a wide lawn and an enclosed backyard, and a low hedge of shrubs with red berries, and a covered gallery running around three sides of the house. We did not keep a cat, because my aunt thought cats were hypocrites, and we gave up keeping a dog after Snowy drowned and Rex was poisoned. My parents were Anglican missionaries in China; my Aunt Elspeth was bringing me up.
I knew even then that Mrs. Quale was mistaken about Lily. She could never have wanted a close girlfriend. The Polish chum was just a handbook she studied for expertise. Lily kept a large pond stocked with social possibilities, nearly all boys, and thought nothing of calling me on a Saturday if some other happy chance had let her down. My aunt, hearing my end of the negotiation, would dub me a human jellyfish; but one of the things adults forget is how complete younger people seem to one another, how individual and clearly defined. It is the grown person who looks evasive and blurry, who needs to improvise. Lily to me was without shadow: I took it for granted she worked her arrangements with hook and reel. My easygoing response was more toughly snobbish, and so more injurious to Lily, than my aunt could guess. Probably, I thought well of myself for letting Leo Quale’s little sister get away with murder.
Before that time, when I was still in seventh grade—in those days known as Junior Fourth—my aunt remarked that it would be good for someone like me, raised by a woman, to have a stalwart figure of some kind to look up to. I thought about Lily, and the scale of her nerve, and how she learned the uses of gall from watching her brother Leo, and I said, “You mean like Leo Quale?”
“Leo has certain qualities,” said my aunt, as if he had barely escaped hanging. “It was more a gentleman I had in mind—say, like Mr. Coleman.”
She was defining a stage of growth as well as a caste. It is true that at fifteen Leo was too advanced to make a friend of me, but he was still too immature to offer paternal advice about sexual prudence and financial restraint. (My aunt actually believed fathers can do this.) She began to think well of him later that year, after running out of other models for me. To my aunt the male nature was expected to combine the qualities of an Anglo-Canadian bank manager and a British war poet, which means to say a dead one. Folded inside the masculine psyche there had to be a bright yearning to suffocate face down in a flooded trench, to bleed from wounds inflicted by England’s enemies, even to be done in by a septic flea bite, if a patriotic case could be made against the flea.
After school and all day Saturday he delivered groceries to English customers, on both sides of the river. Sometimes he made four or five trips along the same street—particularly Fridays, when there was a rush on beer. Quebec was the only part of Canada where beer could be sold by a grocer, instead of in a government liquor store. We owed the privilege to the twists and snarls of Catholic morality, said my aunt, who drank only sherry.
Leo and my aunt were expecting a war, well ahead of world leaders. “Ah, it’ll come, all right,” he would assure her, lowering a box of provisions from his shoulder to the kitchen table. “And we’ll be in it. Don’t you worry, Mrs. Cope. We need a good old war to sort us out.”