Two Solitudes (19 page)

She thought of Saint-Marc with loathing, as she told herself that if it had not been for Paul she would have left Athanase rather than go on living there any longer. In Saint-Marc she had never been permitted to be herself. She was the wife of Athanase Tallard, an institution, and the people despised her because she was a foreigner. She knew they gossiped about her, saying that any woman with a figure like hers ought to be ashamed of herself for not having a child a year. What the young men said was worse, even if their thoughts were secret. The faces of one or two of them showed how often they wondered what she was like naked, never boldly
or purposely, as if they considered themselves candidates for her body, but with a sort of sly shame. She knew that expression far too well ever to miss it. Besides thinking her sinful, they also assumed that she was not naturally a lady. Ultimately they found out everything in Saint-Marc. Father Beaubien had once criticized her for wearing a dress she particularly liked, saying it was too bold. After that she had deliberately worn ugly, unquestionably decent dresses in Saint-Marc, but she was afraid to tell Athanase why she did so, for fear he would quarrel with the priest and make matters still worse. Could it be possible she would be finished with Saint-Marc after another summer?

Outside in the spring air the evening had not yet begun, but it was late enough for her to feel hungry. She rose and shed the kimono, letting it drop to the floor and stay there. She crossed to the long mirror in the door of the wardrobe and wriggled out of her underclothes. Finally she peeled off her stockings and stood looking at her reflection. After a time she picked up a brush and began to stroke her hair, not thinking of the arc her arm made in its rhythmical movement, nor of the dutiful reflection in the glass.

She knew what she wanted. She wanted men; not to sleep with, not necessarily to touch or even to hold, but men who would look at her in a way suggesting that these things could be if she wished. She wanted men who would laugh with her at the kind of jokes she liked and not be forever serious about the Quebec problem and the Ontario problem and the religious problem. As far as she could see there was only one problem in the whole country that mattered, and that was everyone minding other people's business and never letting anyone have any fun.

Except in the city. The way she remembered her old life in Montreal, she had at least been free. Maybe the respectable
ones were not free, but for people like her there had been liberty of a kind. In the Rue de l'Assomption where Kathleen had grown up, the street counted, not the people. They were in work or were out of work, occasionally the neighbours would help when somebody was sick, but beyond this anything could happen and nobody would really care. In that street you were born knowing there was no sense in caring. There was luck in the street, good and bad, but nobody could plan his own future. You could only take luck when it came and use it while it lasted.

An old whorehouse had stood on one corner of the Rue de l'Assomption and nobody worried about it. Night and day it stood there with blinds drawn, and in the twenty years she lived next door to it, no light had ever showed from any of its windows. It was quieter than any church. As long as anyone remembered, it had been like that and she guessed it was probably like that still. The men who visited it used to walk quickly up the high front steps with their hats pulled down over their foreheads and their coat collars turned up, and they looked straight at the door while they waited for it to open. Later they walked quickly away without glancing right or left. Every Sunday the Madam walked down her front steps dressed in black, her figure a neat right-angled triangle from her projecting bosom to her tiny ankles. A black prayer-book was always clasped in her gloved hands. Leo Ryan, the youngest son of the family next door, told Kathleen when she was fourteen that the Madam was very strict and permitted no swearing or drinking in the house.

But the whorehouse had little part in the life on the Rue de l'Assomption. It was not for the neighbours. Most of them were working people, not even bound together by class since they did not have common schools or a common language.
The French children went to French-language schools where they were taught by French-speaking nuns, and the Irish and the Poles went to other church-controlled schools where English was spoken. The English and the Jews on the street went to a Protestant school where teachers who were paid the same wages as unskilled mechanics taught in a system no one had examined for defects in the last thirty years.

Kathleen was the youngest in a family of four. In a three-story house, they lived in the right half of the second floor. Below them was a family of Jews from Galicia and above them was a crazy Englishman who said he was the younger son of a bleeding earl and that it was a bleeding shaime, him having to live in a place like this.

Her mother died when she was ten. After that her elder sister kept the house until she got married and moved to Worcester in Massachusetts. Then Kathleen kept house for her father and two brothers, working after school to clean and cook and mend for them. She left school when she was fifteen. Her elder brother had a job for a time in a carriage factory, but when he got married he moved with his wife to Hull to work in a match factory there. The younger brother wanted to be a professional hockey player and Kathleen was very proud of him. When he was twenty-five he broke his thigh and tore the cartilage of his right knee and had to hang up his skates for good. He stayed around Montreal for a time shifting from one unskilled job to another, and finally drifted away. When Kathleen last heard of him he was married and living in Oakland, California.

Then she was alone with her father who was a barkeeper in a saloon in the financial district. Connors got Wednesdays off, and of course he never worked on Sunday. When the weather was good on his free days he would sit motionless on
his balcony overhanging the narrow sidewalk and stare at the front of the house across the street. Every house in the block was exactly the same as every other house, and on fine days in summer all the balconies were crowded with families rocking back and forth, watching each other.

As Kathleen grew into a young woman Connors took a baffled and uncomprehending pride in her. Often he cocked his eye under heavy brows and said, as though seeing her for the first time, “Holy Jesus, child! If you ain't like a little blue flower!” And then he would add, “With looks like yours, you can marry the brewer himself.”

Every day of the week except Saturday Connors drank four bottles of Molson's ale and stayed sober, but on Saturdays he got drunk regularly on Irish whiskey. He took an obscure pride in the fact that he would touch no ale but Molson's, and he boasted that he had once shaken hands with Mr. Molson himself. No one could be found who had seen him do it, but he stuck to his claim.

Just before Kathleen's eighteenth birthday Connors died of cirrhosis of the liver, leaving no debts and no assets but the furniture in their flat. For Kathleen, his death was the beginning of a freedom she enjoyed for three years. She had no fear of the city because it was the only place she knew; it was her real home. Having no status in it, she received the subtle compensation of being able to imagine she owned a share in all of it. She could look at Lord Strathcona's mansion on Dorchester Street and think how wonderful it was that her city had a building exactly like a medieval castle; and not only that one, but many. They were just like pictures she had seen in a magazine.

Although Kathleen had little education and no special training, she was never worried about how to earn a living. More than anything else she wanted to go on the stage, but
there was no native theatre in Montreal or anywhere else in Canada, and she had no money to go down to the States and take her chances there. So she got a job selling tickets in a theatre where repertory companies from England and New York played regularly. After six months of standing in a booth so small she could hardly turn around in it, she gave up the theatre and took a job selling stationery and greeting cards in a department store. It was little better than selling tickets. For a time she worked as salesgirl and part-time mannequin in a wholesale dress firm, but the pay was poor and her employer expected her to go out with every cigar-chewing buyer who took a fancy to her.

And then she found a job she really liked. For nearly two years she was a hat-check girl in one of the fashionable hotels. Besides looking after men's hats, coats and sticks, she listened to their jokes, asked about their families, smiled at them indiscriminately, liked them all, and occasionally went to dine with one or another of them in places where their friends were unlikely to see them. She loved the compliments she received, the small presents they gave her, often with no strings attached, and the knowledge that she was something of a character in the hotel. Her one talent was in full use, and so she was completely satisfied, for Kathleen's talent was merely to be herself: easy, natural, giving and accepting without question, never thinking beyond the moment.

It was in the hotel that she met Athanase. He was handsome and vigorous, his hair was just beginning to turn grey, his wit was quick, and they responded to each other at once. She liked older men, especially the ones with no pretences, for they were more likely to be gentle, and they were always grateful to her for being what she was. It had never occurred to her that Athanase would ask her to marry him. Had he been an
English-Canadian she would have refused him. She had seen enough of the English in the hotel to guess that their friends would give anyone like herself a very thin time if she married into their society. But she knew little of the French, and nothing whatever of the French in the country outside Montreal. It was only after she reached Saint-Marc that she learned how much tighter a French family unit can be than an English one, and how much stricter and more traditional French standards are than English ones.

It was not so bad at first. There was the novelty of being mistress of a large house, of having servants, of being idle. Then Paul was born and he absorbed her. It was only after Paul became more independent that Saint-Marc began to bore her. And then the war broke out and things went wrong for Athanase in Ottawa and he aged overnight. Against his Norman stubbornness her Irish good nature had no chance.

She put the brush down and stood still again, looking herself over with eyes that paid little attention to what they saw reflected in the long glass. When the telephone beside the bed began to ring she was startled. It was a moment before she moved to answer it, and then she sat naked on the edge of the bed and lifted the receiver. A man's voice, low-pitched and quietly confident, came over the wire in response to her “Yes?”

“Would you be gracious and have dinner with me tonight? We haven't met, but we came up in the elevator together half an hour ago. I don't enjoy eating alone. I hope you don't either.”

She smiled as she listened to his carefully chosen words, and glanced down at her naked thighs. “Just a minute,” she said.

She set the receiver down and reached for her kimono and slippers. Then she picked up the instrument again and listened as the idle wire buzzed quietly between them. “Do
you know who I am?” she said. “I'm not in the habit of–”

“My dear lady,” he interrupted, “in this country people repeat formulas too often, don't you think?”

She recoiled from the receiver and looked at it. He must be one of the educated ones. The confident bass voice went on explaining why he was calling her and she listened to its tones rather than its words. It held a suggestion of enormous vigour, but at the same time it was controlled and surprisingly gentle. She remembered him as a man just under forty. “Your silence disappoints me,” he was saying.

A slight frown lined her forehead as she tried to think what to do. “But I'd planned to go to the theatre tonight,” she said.

“Definitely?” It was evident he was trying to repress the eagerness from his voice. It was a good sign; if he was eager and nervous he was certainly not the kind of man who hunted a girl with calculation and then despised her once he got what he wanted. She heard him laugh.

“I'll introduce myself,” he said. “I'm Dennis Morey. My home is Winnipeg and that's where I happen to be going now. I'm just back from France.” The voice stopped, then added irrelevantly, “It was awfully cold at sea.”

“I wouldn't want to be unfriendly to anyone just back from the war.”

“That's grand!” The deep voice made a big thing out of “grand,” then lilted slightly as he said more softly, “What's your name?”

“Kathleen.”

“And the rest?”

“Why not let it go at that?”

His voice became almost business-like. “Shall I call for you at your room, or in the lobby?”

“I'll be downstairs at seven-thirty.”

She hung up the phone without waiting to hear him say anything more, and then she laughed quietly to herself. For nearly a minute she sat on the side of the bed. She was still smiling as she dressed and began to make up her face as she hadn't dared in Saint-Marc. Excitement grew warm in her veins like alcohol. It was very sweet. It was life returning. It was water after a long thirst. Even though she was hungry, she took her time, and it was nearly a quarter to eight before she stepped out of the elevator on the ground floor. She could see Dennis Morey standing alone waiting at the end of the passage. As he walked quickly toward her he seemed a huge man, but she noticed that he was light on his feet.

An hour and a half later they were finishing a large and very good dinner. They had eaten hors d'oeuvres, vichyssoise, broiled mackerel that came whole on a platter with the skin crackling crisp, then roast duck and after that French pastries. They had drunk sherry with the soup, and a light chablis with the fish, and a champagne with the fowl. Coffee sharp with chicory came in small aluminum drip-pots with straight wooden handles. When the waiter brought it, Dennis Morey ordered port to follow.