by Anne Degrace
He tries again. “Marriage doesn’t have to stop you, Helen. I wouldn’t stop you. You could go to McGill. You could become anything you want.” She smiles at him, and he continues, encouraged. “You could run for office one day.”
Helen laughs, and it’s like fairy bells. Murphy laughs, too, but there’s a catch to the sound. “Education takes money, Murphy. No man is going to support me to study, and Daddy certainly won’t. No, I have to work, and I won’t just be somebody’s secretary — at least, not for long. Agnes can give me a foot in the door. My father will be beside himself, but who cares?”
“Your mother?”
“My mother doesn’t have opinions. She lets my father have them for her. Sometimes I can’t imagine how it is that he and Agnes are even related.”
They continue, the rising elevation requiring concentration, and a little more work. Soon they have crossed Avenue des Pins and are standing at the entrance to the park. Helen is backlit by the sun as it rises towards midmorning. She takes off her hat and shakes her hair, and Murphy feels a flock of birds burst from his heart in a warm wash of pins and feathers. He closes his eyes.
“Murphy, listen. What we have is . . . nice. More than nice. You treat me — you don’t treat me the way most men do. You treat me like I have a brain in my head —”
“You do —”
“Shhh. Let’s just enjoy the afternoon, okay? When do you have to be back at the station?” She takes his arm again, and they move over the pavement, pigeons parting before them like schools of fish.
“Four o’clock. To get ready for the five o’clock news.”
“And what’s in the news this evening?”
“Doom,” he tells her. “Doom and gloom and more gloom.”
“Oh, Murphy.”
IT’S THE SMELL. It’s the smell of clay and blood and metal. Piss and shit. Creosol; cordite. Sweat. Fear. Guillaume’s face is gaunt, blackened by the backfiring of the Ross rifle and the falling dirt from the trench walls.
“ ’ay, Anglais,” he sneers, and it’s Guillaume’s voice, exactly as he remembers it. He’s alive! He’s alive after all, not dead, how could it be —
And then the face dissolves and now it’s Helen. She’s smiling, her mouth is opening, she’s saying something. “Sniper?” He knows it’s her, but the voice is still Guillaume’s. He holds out a cigarette; it’s all he can think of to do, but then he sees it’s lit, and knows with sudden horror that the glow will be seen by the sniper. He’s on guard duty; how could he have forgotten? And with the rising panic he tries to put out the giveaway glow with his bare hand just as the bullet strikes the face that is Guillaume and Helen, both, a face that breaks like glass. Glass, falling in shards to the muddy floor, and he’s searching for them frantically, two hands feeling in the dark, as if he could put everything back together if only he could find the pieces.
He awakes, his hand scrabbling at the sheet. He can sense in the air of the dark bedroom the fading sound of his own cry. Sure enough, there’s a pounding from the floor above, three raps. Tais-toi. Shut up, they say. He gets up, feels his legs shake beneath him, but by the time he’s standing at the toilet he’s calmer. Standing in the dark, he hears the stream hit the water in the bowl. Through the cracked window he can smell the dry autumn air and wonders at the passage of time; he hadn’t noticed summer’s end.
His hand pauses at the light switch, then lets it drop. He doesn’t want to see his face, to see how old he’s become, although in years he’s not far past thirty. He still has a full head of hair, and when he smiles, he knows he looks younger. He tries to smile when he’s with Helen, as often as he can remember to. Now, in the stark bathroom light, he knows what he would see were he to turn it on: lines and shadows. Too many lines and shadows.
In the kitchen he pours himself a glass of rye whisky from the bottle he keeps in the cupboard for this sort of thing. He doesn’t need to turn on the light; he knows exactly where it sits on the shelf. He sits in the dark on a kitchen chair and puts the bottle between his knees to unscrew the cap, then pours a juice glass full, enjoying the amber colour in the streetlight that seeps in through his landlady’s gauze curtains. He lights a cigarette, puts one foot up on the warm radiator and leans back, feels the hot liquid slide down his throat.
THE RATTLE OF the streetcar has a calming effect, and Murphy is glad for that. He’s had little sleep, and now he’s heading for Westmount, where he’ll meet Helen’s parents, who have decided, finally, that if this fellow of Helen’s is still going to be in the picture after three months, it must be serious enough to warrant Saturday dinner. At least he didn’t have to work today. He’s dressed as well as he can be, in a relatively good suit with the empty sleeve nicely pinned, thanks to Mme Langille, who got a fair bit of mileage out of teasing him as she did.
“Ah, you Anglais! So busy you are, not saying what you feel. Say what you feel! La vie est trop courte — too short, you have to — quelle est l’expression? — take the bull by his horns. You meet the parents, then one-two-three you get married, non?”
He’d smiled and watched her able fingers smooth his sleeve, met the humour in her eyes. She made him feel like a teenager off on his first date. He felt as nervous as one; he was ashamed to find himself hoping that he wouldn’t have to admit to the Westmount Strattons that he lives in the east end.
He watches the people in the streetcar, imagining lives for them. This one has five children at home and a wife round as a pudding; that one’s having an affair with her boss. Across from him is a priest, dressed in a suit with vest and clerical collar. The man is sleeping, nodding forward, soft folds of flesh hang over his collar and Murphy wants to reach over, push him back to the safety of the backrest. He can imagine the priest toppling forward, Murphy unable to catch him with his one good arm. The priest awakens with a snort and adjusts his posture, blinking as he looks out the window at passing buildings, and all at once Murphy knows he must get off, away from the close air filled with people, their thoughts and problems. It’s not the first time, this sudden claustrophobia. He disembarks with perhaps a mile of walking still ahead of him.
Helen is standing on the front porch of the house when he arrives. As he starts up the long walk he thinks he can see, even from that distance, the sharp inhale and the flick of ash that tells him she’s impatient, just this side of angry. He’s surprised; she’s told him before that her father doesn’t approve of women smoking, that it’s low class. Clearly, she’s angry enough not to care.
“Where were you?”
“Sorry.” He leans to kiss her cheek but she moves her head away and stubs the cigarette in the ashtray sitting on the filigree iron porch table.
“It’s just Daddy. It’s important to be punctual. Especially the first time you meet them.” Her look softens. “Never mind.” She pauses, appraising him, and he feels his empty sleeve like a sail billowing in the wind. “You look good,” she says.
They enter, and her mother meets them in the hallway. A wispy woman, she extends a thin hand in greeting. Murphy’s hat is in his hand, and so when she extends hers there is a double awkwardness: not only is it the wrong hand for him to shake, it’s occupied in holding his hat. Helen’s father comes to the rescue.
“I’m Maurice Stratton. My wife, Sybil. Here, let me take that.” He pauses. “And your coat,” he says, clearly unsure of whether Murphy would need help with the latter. He doesn’t. His hat taken care of, he shirks off his coat with a practised motion and hands it to Mr. Stratton, then extends his hand to Mrs. Stratton, who takes it in her right, gives it a little squeeze as if in sympathy, and lets it go. Mr. Stratton just opts for a friendly pat on the shoulder.
Dinner is not as awkward as it might have been, and Helen appears to have forgiven him. Murphy keeps up his end of the conversation, mostly answering questions about himself: his name? Murphy’s an old family name, on his mother’s sid
e. Yes, Irish. Murphy wonders if there’s some problem with that — could anti-Irish sentiment still exist, after all this time? — but he pushes on, trying to appear comfortable.
His father is a small business owner, selling home electronics. Radios, in fact. Yes, it was an old friend of his father’s who had worked for Marconi in the first days of XWA who had introduced him to the station manager. (There was an unspoken effort to employ the vets, and in any case Mr. Galsworth, who himself had not served for reasons of myopia or flat-footedness or some such excuse, was able to, in hiring Murphy, assuage some guilt he felt — but Murphy doesn’t offer this latter information.) It’s been a great opportunity, he agrees. Salary? Yes, a decent salary, he replies vaguely. Room for advancement? Perhaps.
After dinner, in Mr. Stratton’s den, the two men smoke and conversation turns to the economy, and eventually to the stock market.
“Things are taking a turn for the better,” Mr. Stratton tells Murphy, tapping ash into the heavy glass ashtray by way of punctuation. “Much better. My own investments have more than doubled this past year. You can’t get much better than that. It’s been a bad decade, Murphy, but if you can, now’s the time to invest. Build a nice nest egg.” He raises eyebrows like twin caterpillars. “Helen seems quite taken with you.”
“Your daughter is lovely.” Murphy hopes he’s struck the right tone. He’s not sure how much he should say. “I don’t know if she told you, I met her when her Glee Club came to the station to perform. It was a live broadcast. For Dominion Day.”
“Is that so? Well, the Glee Club does her no harm and keeps her out of trouble, I suppose.” He pauses, and Murphy smiles inwardly; he knows that half the Glee Club meetings are actually political meetings for Quebec women’s suffrage. “She’s headstrong, my youngest daughter. What I think she needs is a strong hand —” Murphy can almost feel Mr. Stratton’s effort not to look at his own missing one “— and someone in a good position to look after her. Settle her down.”
“Uh. Right,” Murphy nods.
Later, saying his goodbyes at the door, Murphy thanks them both for their hospitality and says he hopes to see them again. He catches the glance between them, knows it to be cautious approval. He still has much to prove, and they are the least of his worries.
Helen steps onto the porch with him, after her parents have closed the door. She smiles, and her kiss is warm. “They seemed to like you. Did he give you the third degree, Murphy dear?” she asks. “He talked to you about the stock market, didn’t he?”
“He wants you to settle down.”
“He wants to intimidate you. He’s testing, trying to find out how much money you have.” The words are washed in derision. “And anyway, they don’t want a repeat of Cynthia,” she adds.
“Was it so bad?”
“Charlie didn’t have a lot of prospects even before the war. After — he wasn’t the same.”
Murphy recalls his own nightmares. None of us is the same, he thinks. “I —”
But Helen tosses a look towards the door, and beyond it, her father’s den, cutting Murphy off. “I haven’t told them about Ottawa.” She leans against the pillar and crosses her arms. She turns back to face the street, but it looks to Murphy as if she’s seeing something quite a bit more distant.
“That’s not your only option,” he says.
“I don’t see another one right now.”
“I’ve been thinking —”
“Murphy.” All at once the tension in her shoulders subsides, and when she turns her gaze is one of affection. She puts a finger to his lips, then lets it fall. Her eyes dance in the glow of the streetlight across the road. “You have to trust. Things fall into place the way they’re supposed to. Don’t you believe that?”
Around them loom wealthy Westmount houses, their wide verandahs, glowing lights, long front walks.
“No,” says Murphy.
IT’S SEVERAL DAYS before Murphy manages to have a conversation with George Landry. Something George had said to him, compounded with his conversation with Helen’s father, has got Murphy thinking. George and Murphy work opposite shifts: George works the afternoon shift, coming to work in time for the midday stock reports, and staying to help set up the studio for evening programming, when it isn’t bumped by another station. There’s talk of technological changes so that several stations won’t share frequencies, but Murphy sees no evidence of things changing any time soon. Meanwhile, CFCF has a morning news slot, and early mornings suit him, since he sleeps badly anyway. Often, it’s a relief to wake up early.
He’s stayed around after morning news shift rather than going home as he sometimes does, so he’s sitting on the bench outside the building when George walks up, looking dapper. Murphy blows on his hands as he watches George approach; he can see his breath even though the bench is bathed in a last gasp of October sunlight. Murphy has never really liked George. He’s too quick to boast about his service record, about how his special assignments saved thousands of poor buggers like Murphy from the trenches.
George struts towards the front doors, two arms swinging. “Murphy, old chum,” he says when he catches sight of Murphy on the bench. “Been thinking about you.”
“Have you.”
“Yep. What got me thinking,” he sits down beside Murphy and looks at his pocket watch. “Ten minutes. What got me thinking was my last statement. Murph, you really need to get in while it’s good.”
“That’s why I’m here. I wanted to talk to you. You said something about —”
“About borrowing on margin.”
“I just — I was brought up to not go into debt, that’s all. Never buy on time, always stay in the black. But if I want to —”
“If you want to get ahead, chum, you want to take a risk. You need to take a risk. The market’s all about risk. But it’s calculated risk, see? And right now it’s working for people, really working. I should know, I read the stock reports every day. I’ve invested every cent I got, and bought on margin, too. Double the luck. You know what I’m doing in two weeks?”
“What are you doing in two weeks?”
“Taking a vacation. In New York. Joan and I are going to do all the shows, all the best restaurants. It’s our fifth anniversary, and now we can afford to do something extra special. She deserves it.”
“I’m sure she does,” Murphy says. “Congratulations, George.”
“Could be you, Murphy.”
Murphy thinks about celebrating a wedding anniversary with Helen. First, there would have to be a wedding.
“Maybe,” he says.
And then, for the next few days, it seems that everyone is talking stocks. Murphy remembers how, as a child, he’d hear a word he’d never heard before and then suddenly it was everywhere, this word that until recently didn’t exist for him. Now, the words are Block Trade, Blue Chip, Dividend, Equity, Market Order. It seems everyone is buying on margin to get in: borrowing half the cost of the shares in question, matching whatever savings they have. In no time the loan’s repaid and they’re earning big returns. It’s gold, just waiting for a shovel.
THE NEXT TIME he sees Helen it’s for a stroll in Parc Lafontaine. The evening descends quickly now that 1929 is waning, and so they walk briskly in the chill air, the click of Helen’s shoes sharp on the cobbled walkway. It’s a fitting aural backdrop to the intensity of her mood, sharp words falling from her lips as she describes the looming Supreme Court case set in motion by the Alberta Five — a group of women challenging the British North America Act that does not recognize women as “persons.”
“Murphy, they have to win. Honestly, I can’t believe it’s even a court case! It’s ridiculous. So much is happening, finally! And here I am, wasting away in Montreal. Can’t work, can’t get an education, financially dependent on Daddy and his antiquated ideas. There’s a world of change going on out there,
and here I am.”
Murphy lets that one slide. He knows it’s not a slight against his company. He just wishes she would take his arm, the good one with the hand tucked into his coat pocket between them. Helen always walks on his good side; he’s never even had to ask. She just knows. It’s one of the many things he loves about her. To Helen he is himself, no less for his handicap. But does she love him?
“I can’t believe I’m still living in the only province that hasn’t given women the vote. All the more reason to go to Ottawa,” she tells him. “I can’t live in Montreal anymore.” She shows him a new letter from her cousin, pulling it from her bag and waving it at him. “Look. Agnes is the first woman delegate to the League of Nations. She’s going to Geneva! And she wants me in the Ottawa office. Not the library. Her office.”
There it was. He’d do anything for her, but he can’t afford to marry her, or even follow her to Ottawa. And supporting Helen to attend McGill, or any other university, is out of the question — at least, not right now. Not yet.
“Listen,” he tells her. “Let’s plan a dinner. A nice dinner, in a nice restaurant. Right after the court date, what is it, the eighteenth? We can celebrate — the victory of the Alberta Five. And maybe some other news. Some good news.”
She looks at him quizzically, then: “You do think they’ll win, don’t you?” she asks, ignoring his enigmatic comment.
“Yes,” he tells her, finally taking her hand in his. “We’re all due for some good news.”
THAT NIGHT, THE nightmare is worse than usual. He’s in the trench again, but this time his fellow soldiers are all scrambling up the sides. He tries to grab at their ankles, but they slide from his grip; they are ethereal, and he can find no purchase. As each ascends there is a flash of light and they are gone, and he knows he can’t follow. He will be in this trench forever, and as the black mud sucks him down he has never felt such despair. He awakens, sweating and sobbing.
When the shadows recede he pads again to the kitchen, pours a glass of whisky, and imagines Helen’s cool hand on his sweating forehead. He knows, all at once and with absolute conviction, that if Helen was here, the nightmares would stop. He’s certain that his survival depends on this.