The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant (125 page)

“Try reading this,” she said.

I shall forget everything about the war except that at the worst point of it I was asked to read
Dear Octopus
. If Miss Urn had never heard of Thornton Wilder I had never heard of Dodie Smith. I read what I took to be parody. Presently it dawned on me these were meant to be real people. I broke up laughing because of Sabina, Fascism, the Ice Age that was perhaps upon us, because of the one-act play still in my purse. She took the book away from me and closed it and said I would, or would not, be hearing from her.

Now there was excitement in the office: A second woman had been brought in. Mrs. Ireland was her name. She had an advanced degree in accountancy and she was preparing a doctorate in some branch of mathematics none of the men were familiar with. She was about thirty-two. Her hair was glossy and dark; she wore it in braids that became a rich mahogany color when they caught the light. I admired her hair, but the rest of her was angry-looking—flushed cheeks, red hands and arms. The scarf around her throat looked as though it had been wound and tied in a fury. She tossed a paper on my desk and said, “Check this. I’m in a hurry.” Chief Engineer looked up, looked at her, looked down. A play within the play, a subplot, came to life; I felt it exactly as children can sense a situation they have no name for. In the afternoon she said, “Haven’t you done that yet?” She had a positive, hammering sort of voice. It must have carried as far as the portraits in the hall. Chief Engineer unrolled a large map showing the mineral resources of eastern Canada and got behind it. Mrs. Ireland called, to the room in general, “Well, is she supposed to be working for me or isn’t she?” Oh? I opened the bottom drawer of my desk, unlocked the middle drawer, began to pack up my personal affairs. I saw that I’d need a taxi: I had about three pounds of manuscripts and notes, and what seemed to amount to a wardrobe. In those days girls wore white gloves to work; I had two extra pairs of these, and a makeup kit, and extra shoes. I began filling my wastebasket with superfluous cargo. The room had gone silent: I can still see Bertie Knox’s ratty little eyes judging, summing up, taking the measure of this new force. Mr. Tracy, in his mauve glasses, hands in his pockets, came strolling out of his
office;
it was a sort of booth, with frosted-glass panels that did not go up to the ceiling. He must have heard the shouting and then the quiet. He and Mr. Curran and Mr. Elwitt, the diabetic one, were higher in rank than Chief Engineer, higher than Office Manager; they could have eaten Supervisor for tea and no one would dare complain. He came along easily—I never knew him to rush. I remember now that Chief Engineer called him “Young Tracy,” because of his father; “Old Tracy”—the real Tracy, so to speak—was the one who’d gone bust in the Depression. That was why Young Tracy had this job. He wasn’t all that qualified, really; not so different from me. He sat down on Bertie Knox’s desk with his back to him.

“Well, bolshie,” he said to me. This was a long joke: it had to do with my political views, as he saw them, and it was also a reference to a character in an English comic called “Pip and Squeak” that he and I had both read as children—we’d discussed it once. Pip and Squeak were a dog and a penguin. They had a son called Wilfred, who was a rabbit. Bolshie seemed to be a sort of acquaintance. He went around carrying one of those round black bombs with a sputtering fuse. He had a dog, I think—a dog with whiskers. I had told Mr. Tracy how modern educators were opposed to “Pip and Squeak.” They thought that more than one generation of us had been badly misled by the unusual family unit of dog, penguin, and rabbit. It was argued that millions of children had grown up believing that if a dog made advances to a female penguin she would produce a rabbit. “Not a
rabbit,”
said Mr. Tracy reasonably.
“Wilfred.”

I truly liked him. He must have thought I was going to say something now, if only to rise to the tease about “bolshie,” but I was in the grip of that dazzling anger that is a form of snow blindness, too. I could not speak, and anyway didn’t want to. I could only go on examining a pencil to see if it was company property or mine—as if that mattered. “Are you taking the day off or trying to leave me?” he said. I can feel that tense listening of men pretending to work. “I was looking over your application form,” he said. “D’you know that your father knew my father? Yep. A long time ago. My father took it into his head to commission a mural for a plant in Sorel. Brave thing to do. Nobody did anything like that. Your father said it wasn’t up his street. Suggested some other guy. My old man took the
two
of them down to Sorel. Did a lot of clowning around, but the Depression was just starting, so the idea fell through. My old man enjoyed it, though.”

“Clowning around” could not possibly have been my father, but then the
whole thing was so astonishing. “I should have mentioned it to you when you first came in,” he said, “but I didn’t realize it myself. There must be a million people called Muir; I happened to be looking at your form because apparently you’re due for a raise.” He whistled something for a second or two, then laughed and said, “Nobody ever quits around here. It can’t be done. It upsets the delicate balance between labor and government. You don’t want to do that. What do you want to do that for?”

“Mr. Curran doesn’t like me.”

“Mr. Curran is a brilliant man,” he said. “Why, if you knew Curran’s whole story you’d”—he paused—“you’d stretch out the hand of friendship.”

“I’ve been asking and asking for a chair that doesn’t wobble.”

“Take the day off,” he said. “Go to a movie or something. Tomorrow we’ll start over.” His life must have been like that. “You know, there’s a war on. We’re all needed. Mrs. Ireland has been brought here from …”

“From Trahnah,” said Mrs. Ireland.

“Yes, from Toronto, to do important work. I’ll see something gets done about that chair.”

He stood up, hands in his pockets, slouching, really; gave an affable nod all round. The men didn’t see; their noses were almost touching their work. He strolled back to his glass cubicle, whistling softly. The feeling in the room was like the sight of a curtain raised by the wind now sinking softly.

“Oh, Holy Hannah!” Mrs. Ireland burst out. “I thought this was supposed to be a wartime agency!”

No one replied.
My father knew your father. I’ll see something gets done about that chair
. So that is how it works among men. To be noted, examined, compared.

Meanwhile I picked up the paper she’d tossed on my desk hours before and saw that it was an actuarial equation. I waited until the men had stopped being aware of us and took it over and told her I could not read it, let alone check it. It had obviously been some kind of test.

She said, “Well, it was too much to hope for. I have to single-handedly work out some wartime overtime pensions plan taking into account the cost of living and the earnest hope that the Canadian dollar won’t sink.” And I was to have been her assistant. I began to admire the genius someone—Assistant Chief Engineer Macaulay, perhaps—had obviously seen in me. Mrs. Ireland went on, “I gather after this little comic opera we’ve just witnessed that you’re the blue-eyed girl around here.” (Need I say that I’d hear this often? That the rumor I was Mr. Tracy’s mistress now had firm hold
on the feminine element in the room—though it never gained all the men—particularly on the biddies, the two or three old girls loafing along to retirement, in comfortable corsets that gave them a sort of picket fence around the middle? That the obscene anonymous notes I sometimes found on my desk—and at once unfairly blamed on Bertie Knox—were the first proof I had that prolonged virginity can be the mother of invention?) “You can have your desk put next to mine,” said Mrs. Ireland. “I’ll try to dig some good out of you.”

But I had no intention of being mined by Mrs. Ireland. Remembering what Mr. Tracy had said about the hand of friendship I told her, truthfully, that it would be a waste for her and for me. My name was down to do documentary-film work, for which I thought I’d be better suited; I was to be told as soon as a vacancy occurred.

“Then you’ll have a new girl,” I said. “You can teach her whatever you like.”

“Girl?”
She could not keep her voice down, ever. “There’ll not be a girl in this office again, if I have a say. Girls make me sick, sore, and weary.”

I thought about that for a long time. I had believed it was only because of the men that girls were parked like third-class immigrants at the far end of the room—the darkest part, away from the windows—with the indignity of being watched by Supervisor, whose whole function was just that. But there, up on the life raft, stepping on girls’ fingers, was Mrs. Ireland, too. If that was so, why didn’t Mrs. Ireland get along with the men, and why did they positively and openly hate her—openly especially after Mr. Tracy’s extraordinary and instructive sorting out of power?

“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 Center—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.