Home Truths (38 page)

My father’s friend Malcolm Whitmore was the second godparent. He quarrelled with my mother when she said something flippant about Mussolini, disappeared, died in Europe some years later, though perhaps not fighting for Franco, as my mother had it. She often rewrote other people’s lives, providing them with suitable and harmonious endings. In her version of events you were supposed to die as you’d lived. He would write sometimes, asking me, “Have you been confirmed yet?” He had never really held a place and could not by dying leave a gap. The third godparent was a young woman named Georgie Henderson. She was my mother’s choice, for a long time her confidante, partisan, and close sympathizer. Something happened, and they stopped seeing each other.
Georgie was not her real name – it was Edna May. One of the reasons she had fallen out with my mother was that I had not been called Edna May too. Apparently, this had been promised.

W
ithout saying where we were going, my father took me along to visit Georgie one Saturday afternoon.

“You didn’t say you were bringing Linnet” was how she greeted him. We stood in the passage of a long, hot, high-ceilinged apartment, treading snow water into the rug.

He said, “Well, she is your godchild, and she has been ill.”

My godmother shut the front door and leaned her back against it. It is in this surprisingly dramatic pose that I recall her. It would be unfair to repeat what I think I saw then, for she and I were to meet again once, only once, many years after this, and I might substitute a lined face for a smooth one and tough, large-knuckled hands for fingers that may have been delicate. One has to allow elbowroom in the account of a rival: “She must have had something” is how it generally goes, long after the initial “What can he see in her? He must be deaf and blind.” Georgie, explained by my mother as being the natural daughter of Sarah Bernhardt and a stork, is only a shadow, a tracing, with long arms and legs and one of those slightly puggy faces with pulled-up eyes.

Her voice remains – the husky Virginia-tobacco whisper I associate with so many women of that generation, my parents’ friends; it must have come of age in English Montreal around 1920, when girls began to cut their hair and to smoke. In middle life the voice would slide from low to harsh, and develop a chronic cough. For the moment it was fascinating to me – opposite in pitch and speed from my mother’s, which was
slightly too high and apt to break off, like that of a singer unable to sustain a long note.

It was true that I had been ill, but I don’t think my godmother made much of it that afternoon, other than saying, “It’s all very well to talk about that now, but I was certainly never told much, and as for that doctor, you ought to just hear what Ward thinks.” Out of this whispered jumble my mother stood accused – of many transgressions, certainly, but chiefly of having discarded Dr. Ward Mackey, everyone’s doctor and a family friend. At the time of my birth my mother had all at once decided she liked Ward Mackey better than anyone else and had asked him to choose a name for me. He could not think of one, or, rather, thought of too many, and finally consulted his own mother. She had always longed for a daughter, so that she could call her after the heroine of a novel by, I believe, Marie Corelli. The legend so often repeated to me goes on to tell that when I was seven weeks old my father suddenly asked, “What did you say her name was?”

“Votre fille a frôlé la phtisie,”
the new doctor had said, the one who had now replaced Dr. Mackey. The new doctor was known to me as Uncle Raoul, though we were not related. This manner of declaring my brush with consumption was worlds away from Ward Mackey’s “subject to bilious attacks.” Mackey’s objections to Uncle Raoul were neither envious nor personal, for Mackey was the sort of bachelor who could console himself with golf. The Protestant in him truly believed those other doctors to be poorly trained and superstitious, capable of recommending the pulling of teeth to cure tonsillitis, and of letting their patients cough to death or perish from septicemia just through Catholic fatalism.

What parent could fail to gasp and marvel at Uncle Raoul’s announcement? Any but either of mine. My mother could invent and produce better dramas any day; as for my father, his French wasn’t all that good and he had to have it explained. Once he understood that I had grazed the edge of tuberculosis, he made his decision to remove us all to the country, which he had been wanting a reason to do for some time. He was, I think, attempting to isolate his wife, but by taking her out of the city he exposed her to a danger that, being English, he had never dreamed of: this was the heart-stopping cry of the steam train at night, sweeping across a frozen river, clattering on the ties of a wooden bridge. From our separate rooms my mother and I heard the unrivalled summons, the long, urgent, uniquely North American beckoning. She would follow and so would I, but separately, years and desires and destinations apart. I think that women once pledged in such a manner are more steadfast than men.

“Frôler”
was the charmed word in that winter’s story; it was a hand brushing the edge of folded silk, a leaf escaping a spiderweb. Being caught in the web would have meant staying in bed day and night in a place even worse than a convent school. Charlotte and Angus, whose lives had once seemed so enchanted, so fortunate and free that I could not imagine lesser persons so much as eating the same kind of toast for breakfast, had to share their lives with me, whether they wanted to or not – thanks to Uncle Raoul, who always supposed me to be their principal delight. I had been standing on one foot for months now, midway between
frôler
and
falling into
, propped up by a psychosomatic guardian angel. Of course I could not stand that way forever; inevitably my health improved and before long I
was declared out of danger and then restored – to the relief and pleasure of all except the patient.

“I’d like to see more of you than eyes and nose,” said my godmother. “Take off your things.” I offer this as an example of unnecessary instruction. Would anyone over the age of three prepare to spend the afternoon in a stifling room wrapped like a mummy in outdoor clothes? “She’s smaller than she looks,” Georgie remarked, as I began to emerge. This authentic godmother observation drives me to my only refuge, the insistence that she must have had something – he could not have been completely deaf and blind. Divested of hat, scarf, coat, overshoes, and leggings, grasping the handkerchief pressed in my hand so I would not interrupt later by asking for one, responding to my father’s muttered “Fix your hair,” struck by the command because it was he who had told me not to use “fix” in that sense, I was finally able to sit down next to him on a white sofa. My godmother occupied its twin. A low table stood between, bearing a decanter and glasses and a pile of magazines and, of course, Georgie’s ashtrays; I think she smoked even more than my mother did.

On one of these sofas, during an earlier visit with my mother and father, the backs of my dangling feet had left a smudge of shoe polish. It may have been the last occasion when my mother and Georgie were ever together. Directed to stop humming and kicking, and perhaps bored with the conversation in which I was not expected to join, I had soon started up again.

“It doesn’t matter,” my godmother said, though you could tell she minded.

“Sit up,” my father said to me.

“I am sitting up. What do you think I’m doing?” This was
not answering but answering back; it is not an expression I ever heard from my father, but I am certain it stood like a stalled truck in Georgie’s mind. She wore the look people put on when they are thinking, Now what are you spineless parents going to do about that?

“Oh, for God’s sake, she’s only a child,” said my mother, as though that had ever been an excuse for anything.

Soon after the sofa-kicking incident she and Georgie moved into the hibernation known as “not speaking.” This, the lingering condition of half my mother’s friendships, usually followed her having said the very thing no one wanted to hear, such as “Who wants to be called Edna May, anyway?”

Once more in the hot pale room where there was nothing to do and nothing for children, I offended my godmother again, by pretending I had never seen her before. The spot I had kicked was pointed out to me, though, owing to new slipcovers, real evidence was missing. My father was proud of my quite surprising memory, of its long backward reach and the minutiae of detail I could describe. My failure now to shine in a domain where I was naturally gifted, that did not require lessons or create litter and noise, must have annoyed him. I also see that my guileless-seeming needling of my godmother was a close adaptation of how my mother could be, and I attribute it to a child’s instinctive loyalty to the absent one. Giving me up, my godmother placed a silver dish of mint wafers where I could reach them – white, pink, and green, overlapping – and suggested I look at a magazine. Whatever the magazine was, I had probably seen it, for my mother subscribed to everything then. I may have turned the pages anyway, in case at home something had been censored for children. I felt and am certain I have not invented Georgie’s disappointment at not seeing Angus alone.
She disliked Charlotte now, and so I supposed he came to call by himself, having no quarrel of his own; he was still close to the slighted Ward Mackey.

My father and Georgie talked for a while – she using people’s initials instead of their names, which my mother would not have done – and they drank what must have been sherry, if I think of the shape of the decanter. Then we left and went down to the street in a wood-panelled elevator that had sconce lights, as in a room. The end of the afternoon had a particular shade of color then, which is not tinted by distance or enhancement but has to do with how streets were lighted. Lamps were still gas, and their soft gradual blooming at dusk made the sky turn a peacock blue that slowly deepened to marine, then indigo. This uneven light falling in blurred pools gave the snow it touched a quality of phosphorescence, beyond which were night shadows in which no one lurked. There were few cars, little sound. A fresh snowfall would lie in the streets in a way that seemed natural. Sidewalks were dangerous, casually sanded; even on busy streets you found traces of the icy slides children’s feet had made. The reddish brown of the stone houses, the curve and slope of the streets, the constantly changing sky were satisfactory in a way that I now realize must have been aesthetically comfortable. This is what I saw when I read “city” in a book; I had no means of knowing that “city” one day would also mean drab, filthy, flat, or that city blocks could turn into dull squares without mystery.

We crossed Sherbrooke Street, starting down to catch our train. My father walked everywhere in all weathers. Already mined, colonized by an enemy prepared to destroy what it fed on, fighting it with every wrong weapon, squandering strength he should have been storing, stifling pain in silence rather than
speaking up while there might have been time, he gave an impression of sternness that was a shield against suffering. One day we heard a mob roaring four syllables over and over, and we turned and went down a different street. That sound was starkly terrifying, something a child might liken to the baying of wolves.

“What is it?”

“Howie Morenz.”

“Who is it? Are they chasing him?”

“No, they like him,” he said of the hockey player admired to the point of dementia. He seemed to stretch, as if trying to keep every bone in his body from touching a nerve; a look of helplessness such as I had never seen on a grown person gripped his face and he said this strange thing: “Crowds eat me. Noise eats me.” The kind of physical pain that makes one seem rat’s prey is summed up in my memory of this.

When we came abreast of the Ritz-Carlton after leaving Georgie’s apartment, my father paused. The lights within at that time of day were golden and warm. If I barely knew what “hotel” meant, never having stayed in one, I connected the lights with other snowy afternoons, with stupefying adult conversation (Oh, those shut-in velvet-draped unaired low-voice problems!) compensated for by creamy bitter hot chocolate poured out of a pink-and-white china pot.

“You missed your gootay,” he suddenly remembered. Established by my grandmother,
“goûter”
was the family word for tea. He often transformed French words, like putty, into shapes he could grasp. No, Georgie had not provided a
goûter
, other than the mint wafers, but it was not her fault – I had not been announced. Perhaps if I had not been so disagreeable with her, he might have proposed hot chocolate now, though I
knew better than to ask. He merely pulled my scarf up over my nose and mouth, as if recalling something Uncle Raoul had advised. Breathing inside knitted wool was delicious – warm, moist, pungent when one had been sucking on mint candies, as now. He said, “You didn’t enjoy your visit much.”

“Not very,” through red wool.

“No matter,” he said. “You needn’t see Georgie again unless you want to,” and we walked on. He must have been smarting, for he liked me to be admired. When I was not being admired I was supposed to keep quiet. “You needn’t see Georgie again” was also a private decision about himself. He was barely thirty-one and had a full winter to live after this one – little more. Why? “Because I say so.” The answer seems to speak out of the lights, the stones, the snow; out of the crucial second when inner and outer forces join, and the environment becomes part of the enemy too.

Ward Mackey used to mention me as “Angus’s precocious pain in the neck,” which is better than nothing. Long after that afternoon, when I was about twenty, Mackey said to me, “Georgie didn’t play her cards well where he was concerned. There was a point where if she had just made one smart move she could have had him. Not for long, of course, but none of us knew that.”

What cards, I wonder. The cards have another meaning for me – they mean a trip, a death, a letter, tomorrow, next year. I saw only one move that Saturday: my father placed a card face up on the table and watched to see what Georgie made of it. She shrugged, let it rest. There she sits, looking puggy but capable, Angus waiting, the precocious pain in the neck turning pages, hoping to find something in the
National Geographic
harmful for children. I brush in memory against the spiderweb:
what if she had picked it up, remarking in her smoky voice, “Yes, I can use that”? It was a low card, the kind that only a born gambler would risk as part of a long-term strategy. She would never have weakened a hand that way; she was not gambling but building. He took the card back and dropped his hand, and their long intermittent game came to an end. The card must have been the eight of clubs – “a female child.”