“Can you use these skates?” he would ask.
“I don’t think so. Thanks all the same.”
In every Châtelroux household there were skates that seemed to have arrived on their own, and that no one could wear. Ours were attached to the lock of a shutter. Every so often my aunt unhooked the skates and examined them. “Steven, are you sure they aren’t yours?”
“They’re miles too big.”
“Well, they certainly don’t belong to me.”
“Somebody must have left them behind.”
“I suppose so. I wish he’d come and take them back.”
She tried to fob them off on Leo. He took one look and said, “Gurruls’.”
“Girls’ skates, Leo? Are you sure? Perhaps your mother could try wearing them, or Lily. Lily would have to grow into them, of course.”
“Lily doesn’t wear black skates. Only white.”
Another day, she tried to get him to take home an assortment of piano scores, and seemed astonished to hear the Quales had no piano.
“Why not, Leo? Don’t you like music?”
“My dad likes that Gershwing,” he said, after a pause.
It is the only time I can ever remember my aunt’s seeming foolish to me. She was pink in the face, ready to lead him by the hand through Gershwin to Bach. I bring to mind her flushed forehead and the excitement in the room, tension I was still too young to be able to measure, generated by the presence of the town dunce, unteachable and dying to go to war. Mr. Coleman had been right about her reading; Leo entered her imagination on the same wave as the Depression. For a while she decided the poor were to be joined, or imitated, rather than tided over. Leo was not offended; he did not know he was poor. The Quales were better off than most of their neighbors.
My aunt began to say that a taste of family life, of the warm, untidy kind that Leo surely enjoyed, might be good for me. She often sent me to the Quales’ house with a grocery list for Leo, when she could as easily have called the store. A sheltered boy had much to learn from a brave, older boy already making his own way, she said; but all I learned, tagging after someone too big and too different, was that I had it in me to resent my aunt. I couldn’t hate her. She wasn’t a mean woman, not even strict by nature. She was trying to make up for the absence of a man’s firm guidance.
Their family life seemed to me fierce and mournful. Between Leo and his mother lay something cold, like cold poison. On one of her dark days I watched Mrs. Quale putting Leo’s plaid shirt through the hand wringer, clamped on the edge of the sink.
“On top of that,” she said, perhaps to herself, not to me, “he had to take his time getting born. Arse first, as if he had all the leisure in the world. In no hurry. Didn’t care about me. They said, ‘Come on, Mrs. Q., make an effort, you don’t want him to strangle.’ He was blue in the face, when they finally saw he had a face. Didn’t get oxygen. That’s why. No oxygen. Nurse said, ‘So don’t be surprised if he stays pretty dim from the neck up.’ ”
Pursuing his cultural awakening, my aunt led Leo past the dining room, where he stopped to stare at an engraved portrait of Sir Walter Scott, but before he could ask who it was, and his age, she ushered him through to the parlor, showed him books, and said, “You may borrow anything.”
His hand went straight to “The Case of Sergeant Grischa,” which he may have taken to be a detective story. He kept it, I think, about three months, returned it, then asked to have it again.
Much later, Lily told me about the first time he brought the book to supper and propped it in front of his plate. He had been reading it some five weeks.
“What’re you wasting time on now?” said his mother.
“Let the boy read,” said Mr. Quale. “It’s education.”
Mrs. Quale had nothing against that. She believed in education but was not sure how it was obtained.
“Well, what is it?” said Mr. Quale. “Answer your mother when she speaks to you.”
“Book I borrowed from Mrs. Cope.”
“Take it back,” his father said. “They’ll be saying you stole it.”
“Tell me, Leo,” said Lily. “Tell me what it’s about.” She was so crazy about reading that she read the stuff on calendars. “I’ll read to you, Leo. I’ve finished eating. Do you want me to read to you?”
Lily was the favorite: they didn’t mind letting her read. When she could not pronounce a word, she skipped the whole line. The radio news, tuned to the pitch of Mrs. Quale’s voice when she raised it, ran alongside Lily’s tone, which was soft and unsteady. Mrs. Quale soon grew sick and tired of hearing Lily, and she could not figure out what sort of army the sergeant belonged to. Mr. Quale became impatient, too. He shouted that in his day deserters were stood up and shot, and that was the end of it. They didn’t drag their existence on for dozens of pages. Mrs. Quale said it would do Leo a lot more good if he read to Lily. They did try it that way, several evenings, but he didn’t enjoy it, and for the others he was too slow. He finally finished the book, on his own, and was the only one in the family who knew the deserter was stood up and shot.
Leo had his tonsils and adenoids out and walked home an hour later, bleeding into a towel. His small mother was with him, holding on to his sleeve. The cuts became infected, and he nearly died. When he was said to be out of danger, my aunt made me go and see him. She sent two jars of grape jelly, wrapped in leftover Christmas paper, and a note of encouragement, signed, “(Mrs.) Elizabeth B. Cope.”
My first surprise was that they were humbly glad to see me—the shrimpy parents, and Lily, wearing just her petticoat, her hair all suds. (Rumor had it that Catholics never washed.)
“Get some clothes on you,” her father said. “There’s company.”
Leo was getting royal treatment, propped up in his parents’ double bed with an embroidered pillow stuffed behind his neck. A number of unsorted social facts were shed from my person as I accepted his invitation to sit down at the foot of the bed.
He said, “Well, sport,” in a husky whisper, and moved his legs to allow me more room. I hardly dared look at him—I was not sure how to deal with my advancement to family friend—and stared instead at the pattern of daisies and asters on the pillow case. On a table next to the bed was a white enamel basin with a towel over it. He said they were giving him emetics, so he would throw up the rest of the infection.
“Well, sport,” he said again, meaning, I think, that extra conversation was up to me. The room was dark, ferociously heated by a kerosene stove. A stylized design of birch leaves, or sunflower petals, had been carved in the stove lid, to serve as vents. The heat and brilliance of the flame had turned the stove into a magic lantern: the whole ceiling was covered with ornamentation, hugely magnified, in quivering red and blue. Lily came in and sat down, combing her wet hair. She had buttoned on a gray cardigan belonging to her father, which fitted her like a coat. She said, “You’re fine, Leo,” because she still thought he might be dying.
Leo changed the position of his feet. I took it for a hint and got straight off the bed. He said, “Come again, sport,” and that rounded off the visit.
In March he put his clothes on, and found that everything he owned was short in the legs and sleeves. He had to duck under the frame doorway between the kitchen and storm porch. He did not return to work at once but did odd jobs around the house, getting his strength back. My aunt had a new delivery boy, Doug Bagshaw. He kept his tips, coppers and nickels, in a baking-powder tin. He liked to weigh the tin in his hand and make the coins jingle. My aunt did not try to draw him out, and never once said he or the Bagshaws might be good for me. When she referred to the old days, before Leo was taken so ill, it was to mention Herbie Dunn and his kind gift of the Jack Buchanan record. She recalled other Buchanan songs—“Two Little Bluebirds” and “A Cup of Coffee, a Sandwich, and You”—which she hummed for me. Buchanan was so tall, and his top hat made him so much taller, that he had trouble finding suitable dance partners. Saying this, she drew herself up, even straig
hter than before.
“I’m the general, you can be Grischa, the rest of you are soldiers.” That was Lily, marshaling her troops of little girls on the soggy spring lawn. There had been a freeze, then a thaw, then a new fall of spring snow. The game was a mixture of hide-and-seek and tag, with two teams drawn up, as in red rover or run sheep run. Anyone on the wrong side, the army that wasn’t Lily’s, could be shot on sight. “Grischa” was leader of a team, the equivalent of being a general. The victims lay down and got their coats wet.
Leo had been sweeping the front walk. Now he stood leaning on his broom, eating jujubes out of a paper bag. There was only one other boy, Vince Whitton, aged six. His sister, Beryl, wasn’t allowed to play in the street unless she agreed to take him with her.
Vince said, “One other time, I was over here and some person gave us some jujubes,” but Leo never made a move.
My aunt had sent me across the river after school to find out if Leo was ever going to work for the grocer again; it would be her last show of interest in the Quales. I stood, neither claimed nor discarded, doing nothing in particular, watching Lily in her red coat.
Just then Mr. Quale came along the street and up the walk Leo had cleared of snow. He wore a wool cap and a long gray scarf. He said to Leo, “How do you stand all that jabbering?,” meaning the little girls, excited and shrill.
Nothing is so numbing as an unexpected audience. The soldiers started to pick lumps of snow from each other’s coats. Mr. Quale nodded his head, as if it were on a wire spring, and took his cold pipe out of his pocket. He pointed the stem at the girls, then at us, and said, “And bear this in mind, lads. You can’t ever do a bloody thing with them.”
Now Mrs. Quale appeared on the doorstep. She held up a white stocking so we could see the hole in it, and called, “I’ll thrash you, Lily Quale—I swear to God!”
Vince Whitton started to wail: “Beryl, I want to go home.”
“Go home, then.”
“Not without you.”
“Glory, wouldn’t I be glad to see the last of you,” his sister said.
When the war came Leo waited to be the right age; then he enlisted and left Châtelroux. His mother baked coconut biscuits and marble cake, which she posted to him in a tin box. He brought the box back empty when he came on leave. They talked about different things to eat. She had an old, stained, illustrated cookbook they looked at together, and Leo would pick out what he wanted for supper. No more of everybody eating something different: the others had to settle for Leo’s choice.
Lily and I commuted to high schools in Montreal. We took the same train in the morning but did not sit together. Girls sat with girls, boys with boys. Sometimes in the afternoon we saw each other in Windsor Station. The Quales had moved to a two-story, semi-detached house made of orange brick. A steep, narrow staircase rose out of the living room. It was the first thing you saw when you came in. Mrs. Quale waxed the steps and kept them very clean, and never missed a chance to say “upstairs.” There was a bathroom and an indoor toilet. They were buying the house inch by inch.
Leo’s room contained a large bed with a candlewick spread and a varnished desk, in case he had something to write. The desk and the counterpane were the first things Mrs. Quale ever had delivered from Eaton’s. No sooner were they moved upstairs than he went away, leaving behind his civilian life and his life altogether. On that wartime Saturday when I sat doing homework with Lily, Leo had got to Halifax with his regiment and was waiting to embark. His bed was always made up, Lily told me. Mrs. Quale, who now loved Leo best, had heard about embarkation leaves that occurred twice, sons and husbands who came back after having said good-bye. She thought she might see Leo, late at night, under the light in the porch, carrying his kit. Some women dreaded any hitch in the slow process of separation. It was impossible to speak the same brave words twice. Some said they would as soon face a ghost as a man seen off back a few days later but somehow different in look and manner, already remote.
When Mrs. Quale would let us, we used Leo’s desk. In the kitchen our books got stained, because Mrs. Quale kept wiping the table oilcloth with a soapy rag, part of an old undershirt of Leo’s. Upstairs we were obliged to sit at opposite ends of the desk, so our knees wouldn’t touch. Mrs. Quale would look in, bringing us something to eat or drink, or just making sure we hadn’t stirred from our chairs. Once, I remember, she said, “Who’s winning?” as though “education” were another of Lily’s games, one for which Leo had never found the knack.
Lily tried again: “How about letting us work in Leo’s room?”
“You heard me. Not unless I’m in the house.”
“You are in the house.”
Mrs. Quale replied that we were to keep away from the stairs altogether. She was here, yes, but not for long. She sounded as if she had finally decided to quit her home and family, but she was just taking an embroidered tray runner over to Mrs. Bagshaw’s, because of next day’s Sodality sale. The sale was for the benefit of Catholic missions: my father’s rivals.
“Steve,” she said, “either you go home right away or you promise you’ll stay where you are, by the window, where the neighbors can see you.”
In their new kitchen hung a mirror with a frame of grained pitch pine—just for decoration. No one had to wash or shave in the kitchen sink. Mrs. Quale pinned a blue feather to her hat, then stared at it.
“Keep the feather on, Mum,” said Lily. “It looks lovely.” But Mrs. Quale could not decide.
Five minutes after her mother had gone out the front door, Lily said, “It would be better upstairs. We can’t even spread our things out here—there’s so much stuff on the table, ketchup and mustard and that. And I hate the noise of that kitchen clock. It’s like a hammer.”
“She said to stay near the window.”
“Dad stops work at noon Saturdays, but he never gets in before five. Mum will be having tea with the other ladies.”
“She might want to come back, just to see where you are,” I said. “She may change her mind about wearing the feather.”
“No, not now. She’d have done it right away.” The clock was a china plate with a pattern of windmills. The arms of the tallest windmill told the time. She looked up; we both did. “Don’t bother to bring all your books,” she said. “Just what you’ll be needing.”
Upstairs we started one thing, then another. There wasn’t much to it; we never got beyond high fever. I wanted to pull down the blind, but Lily said it would draw the neighbors’ attention. She folded the bedspread—her mother’s pride. She must have made a mistake about the family timetable, for we suddenly heard Mr. Quale at the front door. We were on our feet and presentable by the time he reached the kitchen and dropped something—a newspaper, probably—on the table. He got a bottle out of the icebox and poured himself a beer, capped the bottle, put it back. There was a moment of silence: he may have picked up the blue feather lying on the drainboard, wondering what it was doing there. Or he may have noticed the books we’d left behind, or heard us moving around, talking in whispers. He plodded to the foot of the stairs and called, “Who’s home?”
Lily pulled the coverlet over the sheets and smoothed it. We started down the staircase and met him, almost at the top.
“Want me to get your tea, Dad?” she said.
“I’m all right.” He did not acknowledge me.
Lily collected the rest of my books from the kitchen. I held them flat on my chest, like a shield. She came with me along the river road, up the wooden steps to the bridge, and about halfway across. The Montreal train rushed by and the whole bridge shook; we had to stop and hold on to the railing. As the noise faded, in a thinning mist of steam and soot, she said, “Leo’s gone for good. I’ve said good-bye to him. I know it. Dad’s already starting to say I’m all they’ve got, and Leo isn’t even overseas. I’m not all they’ve got. They’ve got their new house.”
When Lily arrived home her mother was waiting in the doorway. She smacked Lily’s face twice, and Mr.
Quale came running out of the kitchen, shouting something. He stopped to unbuckle his belt. Lily thought, God in Heaven, is he going to take all his clothes off, and she backed off and went down the front step and stood in the street. Her father came no farther than the veranda, because of the neighbors. He had his belt in his hand and looked as if he had just got up. They stared at each other, with the length of the front walk between them. Then he threaded the belt back on and said, “Have I ever laid a hand on you? But just you keep out of my way, now. Stay out of my way. That’s what I want to tell you.” His voice was so steady and quiet that Lily began to cry.
He had looked in Leo’s room and seen nothing—and he was a policeman who later became a detective, specializing in divorces and evidence of adultery. When his wife came home the first thing she did was turn back the bedspread, and she found makeup from Lily’s bare legs all over the sheet.
The Quales came to my aunt’s house that night, carrying a leather grip. My aunt, sensing something, told me to go to my room. I was too big to be ordered that way, exactly, but I went upstairs and lay on the floor and listened through the iron grille of the hot-air register. I could hear Mrs. Quale telling my aunt how I had played them false and destroyed their daughter.
My aunt made an astonishing reply: “You have let that girl run wild. It’s a wonder nothing worse has ever happened. She roams all over town on Leo’s bike, talking to strangers. She has been seen near the highway, talking to men in cars. She has been seen with a gang, Lily the only girl, throwing stones at people in canoes.”
The stone-throwing incident had occurred when Lily was eleven. My aunt was not trying to excuse me but simply was upholding the tradition that made girls responsible for their own virtue. I was guilty of having disobeyed Lily’s mother—nothing more.
“Put that thing away,” my aunt said, sharply, next.
The Quales had opened the leather bag and were attempting to unfold the evidence. “It’s the sheet,” said Mr. Quale—his only remark.
“I believe you. Please put it away.”
Montreal Stories Page 28
