Home Truths (34 page)

“What blinking idiot would ever marry her?” said Bertie Knox. “Ten to one she’s not married at all. Ireland must be her maiden name. She thinks the ‘Mrs.’ sounds good.” I began to wonder if she was not a little daft sometimes: she used to talk to herself; quite a lot of it was about me.

“You can’t run a wartime agency with
that
going on,” she’d say loudly. “That” meant poor Mr. Tracy and me. Or else she would declare that it was unpatriotic of me to be drawing a man’s salary. Here I think the men agreed. The salary was seventy-five dollars a month, which was less than a man’s if he was doing the same work. The men had often hinted it was a lot for a girl. Girls had no expenses; they lived at home. Money paid them was a sort of handout. When I protested that I had the same expenses as any bachelor and did not live at home, it was countered by a reasonable “Where you live is up to you.” They looked on girls as parasites of a kind, always being taken to restaurants and fed by men. They calculated the cost of probable outings, even to the Laura Secord chocolates
I might be given, and rang the total as a casual profit to me. Bertie Knox used to sing, “I think that I shall never see a dame refuse a meal that’s free.” Mrs. Ireland said that all this money would be better spent on soldiers who were dying, on buying war bonds and plasma, on the purchase of tanks and Spitfires. “When I think of parents scrimping to send their sons to college!” she would conclude. All this was floods of clear water; I could not give it a shape. I kept wondering what she expected me to
do
, for that at least would throw a shadow on the water, but then she dropped me for a time in favor of another crusade, this one against Bertie Knox’s singing. He had always sung. His voice conveyed rakish parodies of hymns and marches to every corner of the room. Most of the songs were well known; they came back to us from the troops, were either simple and rowdy or expressed a deep skepticism about the war, its aims and purposes, the way it was being conducted, and about the girls they had left at home. It was hard to shut Bertie Knox up: he had been around for a long time. Mrs. Ireland said she had not had the education she’d had to come here and listen to foul language. Now absolutely and flatly forbidden by Chief Engineer to sing any ribald song
plainly
, Bertie Knox managed with umptee-um syllables as best he could. He became Mrs. Ireland’s counterpoint.

“I know there’s a shortage of men,” Mrs. Ireland would suddenly burst out.

“Oh umptee tum titty,” sang Bertie Knox.

“And that after this war it will be still worse …”

“Ti umpty dum diddy.”

“There’ll hardly be a man left in the world worth his salt …”

“Tee umpty tum tumpty.”

“But what I do not see …”

“Tee diddle dee dum.”

“Is why a totally unqualified girl …”

“Tum tittle umpty tumpty.”

“Should be subsidized by the taxpayers of this country …”

“Pum pum tee umpty pumpee.”

“Just because her father failed to paint …”

“Oh umpty tumpty tumpty.”

“A mural down in …”

“Tee umpty dum dum.”

“Sorel.”

“Tum tum, oh, dum dum, oh, pum pum, oh, oh, uuuum.”

“Subsidized” stung, for I worked hard. Having no training I had no shortcuts. There were few mechanical shortcuts of any kind. The engineers used slide rules, and the machines might baffle today because of their simplicity. As for a computer, I would not have guessed what it might do or even look like. Facts were recorded on paper and stored in files and summarized by doing sums and displayed in some orderly fashion on graphs. I sat with one elbow on my desk, my left hand concealed in my hair. No one could see that I was counting on my fingers, in units of five and ten. The system by twelves would have finished me; luckily no one mentioned it. Numbers were a sunken world; they were a seascape from which perfect continents might emerge at any minute. I never saw more than their outline. I was caught on Zero. If zero meant Zero, how could you begin a graph on nothing? How could anything under zero be anything but Zero too? I spoke to Mr. Tracy: What occupied the space between Zero and One? It must be something arbitrary, not in the natural order of numbers. If One was solid ground, why not begin with One? Before One there was what? Thin air? Thin air must be Something. He
said kindly, “Don’t worry your head,” and if I had continued would certainly have added, “Take the day off.” Chief Engineer McCreery often had to remind me, “But we’re not
paying
you to think!” If that was so, were we all being paid not to think? At the next place I worked things were even worse. It was another government agency, called Dominion Film Centre – my first brush with the creative life. Here one was handed a folded thought like a shapeless school uniform and told, “There, wear that.” Everyone had it on, regardless of fit. It was one step on: “We’re not paying you to think about whatever you are thinking.” I often considered approaching Mrs. Ireland, but she would not accept even a candy from me, let alone a question. “There’s a war on” had been her discouraging refusal of a Life Saver once.

The men by now had found out about her husband. He had left school at Junior Fourth (Grade Seven) and “done nothing to improve himself.” He was a Pole. She was ashamed of having a name that ended in “ski” and used her maiden name; Bertie Knox hadn’t been far off. Thinking of it now, I realize she might not have been ashamed but only aware that the “ski” name on her application could have relegated it to a bottom drawer. Where did the men get their information, I wonder. Old “ski” was a lush who drank her paycheck and sometimes beat her up; the scarves she wound around her neck were meant to cover bruises.

That she was unhappily married I think did not surprise me. What impressed me was that so many of the men were too. I had become engaged to be married, for the third time. There was a slight overlapping of two, by which I mean that the one in Halifax did not know I was also going to marry the one from the West. To the men, who could not follow my life
as closely as they’d have wanted – I gave out next to nothing – it seemed like a long betrothal to some puppy in uniform, whom they had never seen, and whose Christian name kept changing. One of my reasons for discretion was that I was still under age. Until now I had been using my minority as an escape hatch, the way a married man will use his wife – for “Ursula will never divorce” I substituted “My mother will never consent.” Once I had made up my mind I simply began looking for roads around the obstacle; it was this search, in fact, that made me realize I must be serious. No one, no one at all, knew what I was up to, or what my entirely apocryphal emancipation would consist of; all that the men knew was that this time it did look as if I was going through with it. They took me aside, one after the other, and said, “Don’t do it, Linnet. Don’t do it.” Bertie Knox said, “Once you’re in it, you’re in it, kiddo.” I can’t remember any man ever criticizing his own wife – it is something men don’t often do, anywhere – but the warning I had was this: marriage was a watershed that transformed sweet, cheerful, affectionate girls into, well, their own mothers. Once a girl had caught (their word) a husband she became a whiner, a snooper, a killjoy, a wet blanket, a grouch, and a bully. What I gleaned out of this was that it seemed hard on the men. But then even Mrs. Ireland, who never said a word to me, declared, “I think it’s terrible.” She said it was insane for me to marry someone on his way overseas, to tie up my youth, to live like a widow without a widow’s moral status. Why were she and I standing together, side by side, looking out the window at a gray sky, at pigeons, at a streetcar grinding up the steep street? We could never possibly have stood close, talking in low voices. And yet there she is; there I am with Mrs. Ireland. For once she kept her voice
down. She looked out – not at me. She said the worst thing of all. Remembering it, I see the unwashed windowpane. She said, “Don’t you girls ever know when you’re well off? Now you’ve got no one to lie to you, to belittle you, to make a fool of you, to stab you in the back.” But we were different – different ages, different women, two lines of a graph that could never cross.

Mostly when people say “I know exactly how I felt” it can’t be true, but here I am sure – sure of Mrs. Ireland and the window and of what she said. The recollection has something to do with the blackest kind of terror, as stunning as the bolts of happiness that strike for no reason. This blackness, this darkening, was not wholly Mrs. Ireland, no; I think it had to do with the men, with squares and walls and limits and numbers. How do you stand if you stand upon Zero? What will the passage be like between Zero and One? And what will happen at One? Yes, what will happen?

I
n the third summer of the war I began to meet refugees. There were large numbers of them in Montreal – to me a source of infinite wonder. I could not get enough of them. They came straight out of the twilit Socialist-literary landscape of my reading and my desires. I saw them as prophets of a promised social order that was to consist of justice, equality, art, personal relations, courage, generosity. Each of them – Belgian, French, Catholic German, Socialist German, Jewish German, Czech – was a book I tried to read from start to finish. My dictionaries were films, poems, novels, Lenin, Freud. That the refugees tended to hate one another seemed no more than a deplorable accident. Nationalist pigheadedness, that chronic,
wasting, and apparently incurable disease, was known to me only on Canadian terms and I did not always recognize its symptoms. Anything I could not decipher I turned into fiction, which was my way of untangling knots. At the office where I worked I now spent my lunch hour writing stories about people in exile. I tried to see Montreal as an Austrian might see it and to feel whatever he felt. I was entirely at home with foreigners, which is not surprising – the home was all in my head. They were the only people I had met until now who believed, as I did, that our victory would prove to be a tidal wave nothing could stop. What I did not know was how many of them hoped and expected their neighbors to be washed away too.

I was nineteen and for the third time in a year engaged to be married. What I craved at this point was not love, or romance, or a life added to mine, but conversation, which was harder to find. I knew by now that a man in love does not necessarily have anything interesting to say: If he has, he keeps it for other men. Men in Canada did not talk much to women and hardly at all to young ones. The impetus of love – of infatuation, rather – brought on a kind of conversation I saw no reason to pursue. A remark such as “I can’t live without you” made the speaker sound not only half-witted to me but almost truly, literally, insane. There is a girl in a Stefan Zweig novel who says to her lover, “Is that all?” I had pondered this carefully many years before, for I supposed it had something unexpected to do with sex. Now I gave it another meaning, which was that where women were concerned men were satisfied with next to nothing. If every woman was a situation, she was somehow always the same situation, and what was expected from the woman – the situation – was so limited it was insulting. I had a large opinion of what I could do and provide, yet it
came down to “Is that all? Is that all you expect?” Being promised to one person after another was turning into a perpetual state of hesitation and refusal: I was not used to hesitating over anything and so I supposed I must be wrong. The men in my office had warned me of the dangers of turning into a married woman; if this caution affected me it was only because it coincided with a misgiving of my own. My private name for married women was Red Queens. They looked to me like the Red Queen in
Through the Looking-Glass
, chasing after other people and minding their business for them. To get out of the heat that summer I had taken a room outside Montreal in an area called simply “the Lakeshore.” In those days the Lakeshore was a string of verdant towns with next to no traffic. Dandelions grew in the pavement cracks. The streets were thickly shaded. A fragrance I have never forgotten of mown grass and leaf smoke drifted from yard to yard. As I walked to my commuters’ train early in the morning I saw kids still in their pajamas digging holes in the lawns and Red Queen wives wearing housecoats. They stuck their heads out of screen doors and yelled instructions – to husbands, to children, to dogs, to postmen, to a neighbor’s child. How could I be sure I wouldn’t sound that way – so shrill, so discontented? As for a family, the promise of children all stamped with the same face, cast in the same genetic mold, seemed a cruel waste of possibilities. I would never have voiced this to anyone, for it would have been thought unnatural, even monstrous. When I was very young, under seven, my plan for the future had been to live in every country of the world and have a child in each. I had confided it: with adult adroitness my listener led me on. How many children? Oh, one to a country. And what would you do with them? Travel in trains. How would they go to
school? I hate schools. How will they learn to read and write, then? They’ll know already. What would you live on? It will all be free. That’s not very sensible, is it? Why not? As a result of this idyll, of my divulgence of it, I was kept under watch for a time and my pocket money taken away lest I save it up and sail to a tropical island (where because of the Swiss Family Robinson I proposed to begin) long before the onset of puberty. I think no one realized I had not even a nebulous idea of how children sprang to life. I merely knew two persons were required for a ritual I believed had to continue for nine months, and which I imagined in the nature of a long card game with mysterious rules. When I was finally “told” – accurately, as it turned out – I was offended at being asked to believe something so unreasonable, which could not be true because I had never come across it in books. This trust in the printed word seems all the more remarkable when I remember that I thought children’s books were written by other children. Probably at nineteen I was still dim about relevant dates, plain facts, brass tacks, consistent reasoning. Perhaps I was still hoping for magic card games to short-circuit every sort of common sense – common sense is only an admission we don’t know much. I know that I wanted to marry this third man but that I didn’t want to be anybody’s Red Queen.