Home Truths

by Mavis Gallant

  Cathie was not obliged to wear a rubber apron in her bath, but a muslin shift. She learned the big girls’ trick, which was to take it off and dip it in water, and then bathe properly. When Mildred came round carrying her scissors and her sign Cathie had had her twice-monthly bath and felt damp and new. She said to someone, “That’s my sister,” but “sister” was a dark scowling little thing. “Sister” got into still more trouble: a nun, a stray from Belgium, perhaps as one refugee to another, said to Mildred, swiftly drawing her into a broom-cupboard, “Call me Maman.” “Maman” said the child, to whom “Mummy” had meaning until the day of the scissors. Who was there to hear what was said in the broom-cupboard? What basket-carrier repeated that? It was forbidden for nuns to have favorites, forbidden to have pet names for nuns, and the Belgian stray was sent to the damp wet room behind the chapel and given flower-arranging to attend to. There Mildred found her, by chance, and the nun said, “Get away, haven’t you made enough trouble for me?”

  Cathie was told to pray for Mildred, the trouble-maker, but forgot. The omission weighed on her. She prayed for her mother, grandmother, father, herself (with a glimpse in the prayer of her own future coffin, white) and the uncles and aunts and cousins she knew and those she had never met. Her worry about forgetting Mildred in her prayers caused her to invent a formula: “Everyone I have ever known who is dead or alive, anyone I know now who is alive but might die, and anyone I shall ever know in the future.” She prayed for her best friend, who wanted like Cathie to become a teacher, and for a nun with a mustache who was jolly, and for her confessor, who liked to hear her playing the Radetzky March on the piano. Her hair grew lighter and was brushed and combed by her best friend.

  Mildred was suddenly taken out of school and adopted. Their mother’s sister, one of the aunts they had seldom seen, had lost a daughter by drowning. She said she would treat Mildred as she did her own small son, and Mildred, who wished to leave the convent school, but did not know if she cared to go and live in a place called Chicoutimi, did not decide. She made them decide, and made them take her away. When the girls were fifteen and nineteen, and Mildred was called Desaulniers and not Collier, the sisters were made to meet. Cathie had left school and was studying nursing, but she came back to the convent when she had time off, not because she did not have anywhere else to go, but because she did not want to go to any other place. The nuns had said of Cathie, laughing, “She doesn’t want to leave – we shall have to push her out.” When Cathie’s sister, Mildred Desaulniers, came to call on her, the girls did not know what to say. Mildred wore a round straw hat with a clump of plastic cherries hanging over the brim; her adoptive brother, in long trousers and bow tie, did not get out of the car. He was seven, and had slick wet-looking hair, as if he had been swimming. “Kiss your sister,” said Mildred’s mother, to Cathie, admonishingly. Cathie did as she was told, and Mildred immediately got back in the car with her brother and snatched a comic book out of his hands. “Look, Mildred,” said her father, and let the car slow down on a particular street. The parents craned at a garage, and at dirty-legged children with torn sneakers on their feet. Mildred glanced up and then back at her book. She had no reason to believe she had seen it before, or would ever again.

  The Prodigal Parent

  We sat on the screened porch of Rhoda’s new house, which was close to the beach on the ocean side of Vancouver Island. I had come here in a straight line, from the East, and now that I could not go any farther without running my car into the sea, any consideration of wreckage and loss, or elegance of behavior, or debts owed (not of money, of my person) came to a halt. A conqueror in a worn blazer and a regimental tie, I sat facing my daughter, listening to her voice – now describing, now complaining – as if I had all the time in the world. Her glance drifted round the porch, which still contained packing cases. She could not do, or take in, a great deal at once. I have light eyes, like Rhoda’s, but mine have been used for summing up.

  Rhoda had bought this house and the cabins round it and a strip of maimed landscape with her divorce settlement. She hoped to make something out of the cabins, renting them weekends to respectable people who wanted a quiet place to drink. “Dune Vista” said a sign, waiting for someone to nail it to a tree. I wondered how I would fit in here – what she expected me to do. She still hadn’t said. After the first formal martinis she had made to mark my arrival, she began drinking rye, which she preferred. It was sweeter, less biting than the whiskey I remembered in my youth, and I wondered if my palate or its composition had changed. I started to say so, and my daughter said, “Oh, God, your accent again! You know what I thought you said now? ‘Oxbow was a Cheswick charmer.’ ”

  “No, no. Nothing like that.”

  “Try not sounding so British,” she said.

  “I don’t, you know.”

  “Well, you don’t sound Canadian.”

  The day ended suddenly, as if there had been a partial eclipse. In the new light I could see my daughter’s face and hands.

  “I guess I’m different from all my female relatives,” she said. She had been comparing herself with her mother, and with half sisters she hardly knew. “I don’t despise men, like Joanne does. There’s always somebody. There’s one now, in fact. I’ll tell you about him. I’ll tell you the whole thing, and you say what you think. It’s a real mess. He’s Irish, he’s married, and he’s got no money. Four children. He doesn’t sleep with his wife.”

  “Surely there’s an age limit for this?” I said. “By my count, you must be twenty-eight or -nine now.”

  “Don’t I know it.” She looked into the dark trees, darkened still more by the screens, and said without rancor, “It’s not my fault. I wouldn’t keep on falling for lushes and phonies if you hadn’t been that way.”

  I put my glass down on the packing case she had pushed before me, and said, “I am not, I never was, and I never could be an alcoholic.”

  Rhoda seemed genuinely shocked. “I never said that. I never heard you had to be put in a hospital or anything, like my stepdaddy. But you used to stand me on a table when you had parties, Mother told me, and I used to dance to ‘Piccolo Pete.’ What happened to that record, I wonder? One of your wives most likely got it in lieu of alimony. But may God strike us both dead here and now if I ever said you were alcoholic.” It must have been to her a harsh, clinical word, associated with straitjackets. “I’d like you to meet him,” she said. “But I never know when he’ll turn up. He’s Harry Pay. The writer,” she said, rather primly. “Somebody said he was a new-type Renaissance Man – I mean, he doesn’t just sit around, he’s a judo expert. He could throw you down in a second.”

  “Is he Japanese?”

  “God, no. What makes you say that? I already told you what he is. He’s white. Quite white, entirely white I mean.”

  “Well – I could hardly have guessed.”

  “You shouldn’t have to guess,” she said. “The name should be enough. He’s famous. Round here, anyway.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’ve been away so many years. Would you write the name down for me? So I can see how it’s spelled?”

  “I’ll do better than that.” It touched me to see the large girl she was suddenly moving so lightly. I heard her slamming doors in the living room behind me. She had been clumsy as a child, in every gesture like a wild creature caught. She came back to me with a dun folder out of which spilled loose pages, yellow and smudged. She thrust it at me and, as I groped for my spectacles, turned on an overhead light. “You read this,” she said, “and I’ll go make us some sandwiches, while I still can. Otherwise we’ll break into another bottle and never eat anything. This is something he never shows anyone.”

  “It is my own life exactly,” I said when she returned with the sandwiches, which she set awkwardly down. “At least, so far as school in England is concerned. Cold beds, cold food, cold lavatories. Odd that anyone still finds it interesting. There must be twenty written like it every year. The revolting school, the h
omosexual master, then a girl – saved!”

  “Homo what?” said Rhoda, clawing the pages. “It’s possible. He has a dirty mind, actually.”

  “Really? Has he ever asked you to do anything unpleasant, such as type his manuscripts?”

  “Certainly not. He’s got a perfectly good wife for that.”

  When I laughed, she looked indignant. She had given a serious answer to what she thought was a serious question. Our conversations were always like this – collisions.

  “Well?” she said.

  “Get rid of him.”

  She looked at me and sank down on the arm of my chair. I felt her breath on my face, light as a child’s. She said, “I was waiting for something. I was waiting all day for you to say something personal, but I didn’t think it would be that. Get rid of him? He’s all I’ve got.”

  “All the more reason. You can do better.”

  “Who, for instance?” she said. “You? You’re no use to me.”

  She had sent for me. I had come to Rhoda from her half sister Joanne, in Montreal. Joanne had repatriated me from Europe, with an air passage to back the claim. In a new bare apartment, she played severe sad music that was like herself. We ate at a scrubbed table the sort of food that can be picked up in the hand. She was the richest of my children, through her mother, but I recognized in her guarded, slanting looks the sort of avarice and fear I think of as a specific of women. One look seemed meant to tell me, “You waltzed off, old boy, but look at me now,” though I could not believe she had wanted me only for that. “I’ll never get married” was a remark that might have given me a lead. “I won’t have anyone to lie to me, or make a fool of me, or spend my money for me.” She waited to see what I would say. She had just come into this money.

  “Feeling as you do, you probably shouldn’t marry,” I said. She looked at me as Rhoda was looking now. “Don’t expect too much from men,” I said.

  “Oh, I don’t!” she cried, so eagerly I knew she always would. The cheap sweet Ontario wine she favored and the smell of paint in her new rooms and the raw meals and incessant music combined to give me a violent attack of claustrophobia. It was probably the most important conversation we had.

  “We can’t have any more conversation now,” said Rhoda. “Not after that. It’s the end. You’ve queered it. I should have known. Well, eat your sandwiches now that I’ve made them.”

  “Would it seem petulant if, at this point, I did not eat a tomato sandwich?” I said.

  “Don’t be funny. I can’t understand what you’re saying anyway.”

  “If you don’t mind, my dear,” I said, “I’d rather be on my way.”

  “What do you mean, on your way? For one thing, you’re in no condition to drive. Where d’you think you’re going?”

  “I can’t very well go that way,” I said, indicating the ocean I could not see. “I can’t go back as I’ve come.”

  “It was a nutty thing, to come by car,” she said. “It’s not even all that cheap.”

  “As I can’t go any farther,” I said, “I shall stay. Not here, but perhaps not far.”

  “Doing what? What can you do? We’ve never been sure.”

  “I can get a white cane and walk the streets of towns. I can ask people to help me over busy intersections and then beg for money.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “I’m not. I shall say – let me think – I shall say I’ve had a mishap, lost my wallet, pension check not due for another week, postal strike delaying it even more –”

  “That won’t work. They’ll send you to the welfare. You should see how we hand out welfare around here.”

  “I’m counting on seeing it,” I said.

  “You can’t. It would look –” She narrowed her eyes and said, “If you’re trying to shame me, forget it. Someone comes and says, ‘That poor old blind bum says he’s your father,’ I’ll just answer, ‘Yes, what about it?’ ”

  “My sight is failing, actually.”

  “There’s welfare for that, too.”

  “We’re at cross-purposes,” I said. “I’m not looking for money.”

  “Then waja come here for?”

  “Because Regan sent me on to Goneril, I suppose.”

  “That’s a lie. Don’t try to make yourself big. Nothing’s ever happened to you.”

  “Well, in my uneventful life,” I began, but my mind answered for me, “No, nothing.” There are substitutes for incest but none whatever for love. What I needed now was someone who knew nothing about me and would never measure me against a promise or a past. I blamed myself, not for anything I had said but for having remembered too late what Rhoda was like. She was positively savage as an infant, though her school tamed her later on. I remember sitting opposite her when she was nine – she in an unbecoming tartan coat – while she slowly and seriously ate a large plate of ice cream. She was in London on a holiday with her mother, and as I happened to be there with my new family I gave her a day.

  “Every Monday we have Thinking Day,” she had said, of her school. “We think about the Brownies and the Baden-Powells and sometimes Jesus and all.”

  “Do you, really?”

  “I can’t really,” Rhoda had said. “I never met any of them.”

  “Are you happy, at least?” I said, to justify my belief that no one was ever needed. But the savage little girl had become an extremely careful one.

  That afternoon, at a matinée performance of Peter Pan, I went to sleep. The slaughter of the pirates woke me, and as I turned, confident, expecting her to be rapt, I encountered a face of refusal. She tucked her lips in, folded her hands, and shrugged away when I helped her into a taxi.

  “I’m sorry, I should not have slept in your company,” I said. “It was impolite.”

  “It wasn’t that,” she burst out. “It was Peter Pan. I hated it. It wasn’t what I expected. You could see the wires. Mrs. Darling didn’t look right. She didn’t have a lovely dress on – only an old pink thing like a nightgown. Nana wasn’t a real dog, it was a lady. I couldn’t understand anything they said. Peter Pan wasn’t a boy, he had bosoms.”

  “I noticed that, too,” I said. “There must be a sound traditional reason for it. Perhaps Peter is really a mother figure.”

  “No, he’s a boy.”

  I intercepted, again, a glance of stony denial – of me? We had scarcely met.

  “I couldn’t understand. They all had English accents,” she complained.

  For some reason that irritated me. “What the hell did you expect them to have?” I said.

  “When I was little,” said the nine-year-old, close to tears now, “I thought they were all Canadian.”

  The old car Joanne had given me was down on the beach, on the hard sand, with ribbons of tire tracks behind it as a sign of life, and my luggage locked inside. It had been there a few hours and already it looked abandoned – an old heap someone had left to rust among the lava rock. The sky was lighter than it had seemed from the porch. I picked up a sand dollar, chalky and white, with the tree of life on its underside, and as I slid it in my pocket, for luck, I felt between my fingers a rush of sand. I had spoken the truth, in part; the landscape through which I had recently travelled still shuddered before my eyes and I would not go back. I heard, then saw, Rhoda running down to where I stood. Her hair, which she wore gathered up in a bun, was half down, and she breathed, running, with her lips apart. For the first time I remembered something of the way she had seemed as a child, something more than an anecdote. She clutched my arm and said, “Why did you say I should ditch him? Why?”

  I disengaged my arm, because she was hurting me, and said, “He can only give you bad habits.”

  “At my age?”

  “Any age. Dissimulation. Voluntary barrenness – someone else has had his children. Playing house, a Peter-and-Wendy game, a life he would never dare try at home. There’s the real meaning of Peter, by the way.” But she had forgotten.

  She clutched me again, to steady herself,
and said, “I’m old enough to know everything. I’ll soon be in my thirties. That’s all I care to say.”

  It seemed to me I had only recently begun making grave mistakes. I had until now accepted all my children, regardless of who their mothers were. The immortality I had imagined had not been in them but on the faces of women in love. I saw, on the dark beach, Rhoda’s mother, the soft hysterical girl whose fatal “I am pregnant” might have enmeshed me for life.

  I said, “I wish they would find a substitute for immortality.”

  “I’m working on it,” said Rhoda, grimly, seeming herself again. She let go my arm and watched me unlock the car door. “You’d have hated it here,” she said, then, pleading, “You wouldn’t want to live here like some charity case – have me support you?”

  “I’d be enchanted,” I said.

  “No, no, you’d hate it,” she said. “I couldn’t look after you. I haven’t got time. And you’d keep thinking I should do better than him, and the truth is I can’t. You wouldn’t want to end up like some old relation, fed in the kitchen and all.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “It would be new.”

  “Oh,” she cried, with what seemed unnecessary despair, “what did you come for? All right,” she said. “I give up. You asked for it. You can stay. I mean, I’m inviting you. You can sit around and say, ‘Oxbow was a Cheswick charmer,’ all day and when someone says to me, ‘Where jer father get his accent?’ I’ll say, ‘It was a whole way of life.’ But remember, you’re not a prisoner or anything, around here. You can go whenever you don’t like the food. I mean, if you don’t like it, don’t come to me and say, ‘I don’t like the food.’ You’re not my prisoner,” she yelled, though her face was only a few inches from mine. “You’re only my father. That’s all you are.”