Montreal Stories (36 page)

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.”

“Don’t you look down on us,” said Mrs. Quale. “We’ve got our only son in the service. Lily’s always been head of her class. We own most of the home we live in. My husband has an honored position on the police force. Mr. Quale has never walked a beat.”

Did my aunt smile? Something made Mrs. Quale break into full-throated weeping—nothing like my aunt’s rare, silent tears. It was a comic-strip bawling, Katzenjammer roars of “Wah!” and “Ooh.” My aunt said, “I know, I know,” and offered to make tea. Soon after that I heard the Quales leave.

My aunt did not let me think I was innocent. The only reason she did not send me away to school, as she wanted to, was that my father could not afford the fees. She was saving her own money to put me through university. In the meantime, it would be good if I were to show common sense and gratitude. I had never heard her say I was supposed to be grateful for anything: for a time, it put a wall of shyness between us. The Quales, stretching their means to the limit, shut Lily up with nuns, in one of the places from which her Polish friend had been expelled. I went on commuting, but without a sight of Lily.

Windsor Station was full of soldiers, and there was a brownish, bleak kind of light on winter afternoons. Once I saw Lily’s Polish friend. She was a tender blonde, dimpled, with small blue eyes—something like Leo’s. I noticed her wedding ring, and said, “Is your husband going overseas?”

“Oh, no,” she said. “Morrie’s got a heart. I mean, he’s cardiac. I’m not here for anything in particular. I just came over with my girlfriend.” I had shot past her in height. She had to look up, as Leo’s mother did to Leo. Her girlfriend, talking to a knot of airmen in the shadows of the station, was unknown to me. Lily’s friend seemed to be weighing the advantages of spending any more time in my company, but she must have spent more than I remember: it was she who told me what happened after Lily got home that other afternoon. She was a good-natured girl but restless, as if nothing had yet been settled, in spite of the wedding ring. She wrote me off, abruptly, and turned away. I took that for a good sign. I would not have known how to end the conversation. Something in my manner spoke for me, and would always ease me out of awkward times. So I thought.

“Aren’t you Steven Burnet?” Mitchell Coleman looked wholly different as a soldier: younger, for one thing. The lumpy uniform, the thick boots, the close-cut hair, brought him near to Leo in age and manner. Even in the unprepossessing uniform he seemed neat and spruce, still ready to be knocked unconscious and undressed by strangers—all that was left of his former self.

He gave me a slow look and probably surmised, correctly, that I had known him at once but would never have approached him. “I barely recognized you,” he said. “You’re twice your old height. But there’s still a look—a family look, I suppose. More of an expression than an arrangement of features.” I did not know what to make of a personal observation of that kind. I wondered if he meant to criticize my aunt’s appearance, or mine. “How old can you be now?”

“I’m still going to high school.”

“They tried to teach me how to make Army training films,” he said. “But documentary movies are a string of lies. I decided not to sit the war out.” He did not ask for news of his old friend; the trusted friend who had dropped him,
without a word of explanation, without hearing his side of the case. “Well,” he said. “For King and country, eh?” and there was not a hint or a glance to let me know whether he was being ironic. He shouldered his kit, and we shook hands.

He’s only a corporal, like Leo, I said to myself. At his age he should at least be a captain.

When she was playing at war, Lily made medals out of silver paper. Her soldiers, pronounced dead, got up to receive a decoration. They said, “I’ve got mud on my coat. I’m going to catch it at home. Somebody, help me get the mud off.”

In that war, or one like it, Vince Whitton begins to whine: “Beryl, my feet are getting cold. I’m hungry. I have to go to the bathroom.”

“You can pee your pants, for all I care.”

He stops sniveling for a minute, and moves closer to Leo; leaves the girls to be with the men. Mr. Quale points the stem of his pipe, that time or another, and says, “You can’t do a bloody thing with them.” The players freeze. They stand, hardly breathing, small creatures in an open field, hoping they have become the white of the snow around them and the hawk will leave them alone.

Leo’s death made two of the English newspapers in Montreal. My aunt sent Mrs. Quale a note. Looking back, she felt that the Quales had never been suited to the occasion; in short, they had done me no good whatever. I had learned nothing from Leo or his family—“poor Leo,” he had become. In a sense, they had ceased even to be a family, with Leo gone and Lily away from home, under close surveillance. Once, she said, “The worst mistake I ever made was when I let you chase around after Leo”—which shows how blameless her life must have been.

O
NCE, LONG AGO
, for just a few minutes I tried to pretend I was Harry Lapwing. Not that I admired him or hoped to become a minor Lapwing; in fact, my distaste was so overloaded that it seemed to add weight to other troubles I was piling up then, at twenty-five. I thought that if I could not keep my feelings cordial I might at least try to flatten them out, and I remembered advice my Aunt Elspeth had given me: “Put yourself in the other fellow’s place, Steve. It saves wear.”