Home Truths

by Mavis Gallant

  She said, “I’m from a big family. I’m not used to being alone. I’m not a suicidal person, but I could have done something after that party, just not to see any more, or think or listen or expect anything. What can I think when I see these people? All my life I heard, Educated people don’t do this, educated people don’t do that. And now I’m here, and you’re all educated people, and you’re nothing but pigs. You’re educated and you drink and do everything wrong and you know what you’re doing, and that makes you worse than pigs. My family worked to make me an educated person, but they didn’t know you. But what if I didn’t see and hear and expect anything any more? It wouldn’t change anything. You’d all be still the same. Only you might have thought it was your fault. You might have thought you were to blame. It could worry you all your life. It would have been wrong for me to worry you.”

  He remembered that the rented car was still along a snowy curb somewhere in Geneva. He wondered if Sheilah had the key in her purse and if she remembered where they’d parked.

  “I told you about the ice wagon,” Agnes said. “I don’t remember everything, so you’re wrong about remembering. But I remember telling you that. That was the best. It’s the best you can hope to have. In a big family, if you want to be alone, you have to get up before the rest of them. You get up early in the morning in the summer and it’s you, you, once in your life alone in the universe. You think you know everything that can happen … Nothing is ever like that again.”

  He looked at the smeared window and wondered if this day could end without disaster. In his mind he saw her falling in the snow wearing a tramp’s costume, and he saw her coming to him in the orphanage dressing gown. He saw her drowning face at the party. He was afraid for himself. The story was still unfinished. It had to come to a climax, something threatening to him. But there was no climax. They talked that day, and afterward nothing else was said. They went on in the same office for a short time, until Peter left for Ceylon; until somebody read the right letter, passed it on for the right initials, and the Fraziers began the Oriental tour that should have made their fortune. Agnes and Peter were too tired to speak after that morning. They were like a married couple in danger, taking care.

  But what were they talking about that day, so quietly, such old friends? They talked about dying, about being ambitious, about being religious, about different kinds of love. What did she see when she looked at him – taking her knuckle slowly away from her mouth, bringing her hand down to the desk, letting it rest there? They were both Canadians, so they had this much together – the knowledge of the little you dare admit. Death, near-death, the best thing, the wrong thing – God knows what they were telling each other. Anyway, nothing happened.

  When, on Sunday mornings, Sheilah and Peter talk about those times, they take on the glamour of something still to come. It is then he remembers Agnes Brusen. He never says her name. Sheilah wouldn’t remember Agnes. Agnes is the only secret Peter has from his wife, the only puzzle he pieces together without her help. He thinks about families in the West as they were fifteen, twenty years ago – the iron-cold ambition, and every member pushing the next one on. He thinks of his father’s parties. When he thinks of his father he imagines him with Sheilah, in a crowd. Actually, Sheilah and Peter’s father never met, but they might have liked each other. His father admired good-looking women. Peter wonders what they were doing over there in Geneva – not Sheilah and Peter, Agnes and Peter. It is almost as if they had once run away together, silly as children, irresponsible as lovers. Peter and Sheilah are back where they started. While they were out in world affairs picking up microbes and debts, always on the fringe of disaster, the fringe of a fortune, Agnes went on and did – what? They lost each other. He thinks of the ice wagon going down the street. He sees something he has never seen in his life – a Western town that belongs to Agnes. Here is Agnes – small, mole-faced, round-shouldered because she has always carried a younger child. She watches the ice wagon and the trail of ice water in a morning invented for her: hers. He sees the weak prairie trees and the shadows on the sidewalk. Nothing moves except the shadows and the ice wagon and the changing amber of the child’s eyes. The child is Peter. He has seen the grain of the cement sidewalk and the grass in the cracks, and the dust, and the dandelions at the edge of the road. He is there. He has taken the morning that belongs to Agnes, he is up before the others, and he knows everything. There is nothing he doesn’t know. He could keep the morning, if he wanted to, but what can Peter do with the start of a summer day? Sheilah is here, it is a true Sunday morning, with its dimness and headache and remorse and regrets, and this is life. He says, “We have the Balenciaga.” He touches Sheilah’s hand. The children have their aunt now, and he and Sheilah have each other. Everything works out, somehow or other. Let Agnes have the start of the day. Let Agnes think it was invented for her. Who wants to be alone in the universe? No, begin at the beginning: Peter lost Agnes. Agnes says to herself somewhere, Peter is lost.

  Bonaventure

  He was besieged, he was invaded, by his mother’s account of the day he was conceived; and his father confirmed her version of history, telling him why. He had never been able to fling in their faces “Why did you have me?” for they told him before he could reason, before he was ready to think. He was their marvel. Not only had he kept them together, he was a musical genius, the most gifted child any two people ever had, the most deserving of love. He began to doubt their legend when he discovered the casualness of sex, and understood that anyone who was not detached (which he believed his own talent would oblige him to be) could easily turn into parent and slave. He was not like his own father, who, as a parent, seemed a man who had been dying and all at once found himself in possession of a total life. His father never said this or anything like it, though he once committed himself dangerously in a letter. The father was more reticent than the mother; perhaps more Canadian. He could say what he thought, but not always what he felt. His memories, like the mother’s, were silent, flickering areas of light, surrounded by buildings that no longer exist.

  The son could not place himself in their epic story. They talked, but until the son became an eyewitness their lives were imaginary. Before he was – Douglas Ramsay – the world was covered with mist, palm fronds, and vegetarian reptiles. He said to his father, “The trouble is there are still too many people alive who remember all that.” “All what?” “Oh, everything. The last war.” He was trying to show the distance between them, yet he would have died for either one – perhaps the father first. That made him more violent toward them, and sometimes more indifferent. A year ago, when he was nineteen, he was awarded a fellowship that permitted him to study in Europe. He seldom wrote. Sometimes he forgot all about them. Their existence was pale, their adventure niggling, compared to his own. Family feeling had never dominated his actions; never would. Nevertheless, he discovered this: when he was confused, misunderstood, or insufficiently appreciated, a picture of his father stood upright in his mind. His father’s face, stoic and watchful, transferred from a wartime photograph taken before true history began, appeared when Ramsay’s emotions were dispersed, and his intellect, on which he depended, reduced to water.

  He was in Switzerland, it was a June day, he was recently twenty, and he had to get rid of chocolate wrappers. He had spent the morning in Montreux, and in the short train journey between Montreux and the stop nearest the chalet where he was a guest for the summer, Ramsay had eaten three quarter-pound bars of the sweet, mild chocolate only women are said to like. He could not abandon the wrappers on the impeccable train; he was suddenly daunted by Swiss neatness and the eyes of strangers. Hobbling up the path from the station, he concealed the papers under ferns and stones.

  The chalet, set up on its shelf of lawn, seemed to be watching. It was like an animal, a bison, or a bear, hairy with vines and dark because of its balconies. Once he had got rid of the evidence, he stared boldly back. Parts of his body were unhinged; he was clamped together by invisibl
e hooks that tore the fabric. His knees, his shoulders, his neck were wrenched loose, like the punishment of Judas in an engraving Katharine Moser had put in his room. He had been in a car accident two years before, and would never mend entirely. “Neither will my father,” he said to himself. Their suffering – his own and his father’s – burned the day black. The shrieking of birds, which Katharine Moser thought he ought to like because he was a musician, sank and lodged in every bone. He shut his eyes and stood still, and waited for the seizure to pass, for the muscles to unlock; then he opened his eyes and looked at the lawn. It had not been wrecked by a war or by a woman in temper but by something ordinary – a country storm. The grass was bestrewn with branches, bark, leaves, peony petals, chairs knocked sideways, a child’s watercolors, a strand of dripping vine. A branch shivered and the drops that fell were colder than any water he had ever touched. He imagined Katharine Moser standing here and saying to Heaven, “How dare you do this to my lawn?” As he thought this, the sun came on in a burst of fire, and his face and hands were riddled by stinging light. He saw the mountains, whose names he was daily told and at once forgot, and he saw the burning color of houses that were miles away. This was the landscape that had belonged to Adrien Moser, the great conductor; it had no other reason to command his gaze.

  The prospects Ramsay had known until this summer were of cities – Montreal, and then Berlin. They were the same to him, whether their ruins were dark and soft, abandoned to pigeons and wavy pieces of sky, or created and destroyed by one process, like the machine that consumes itself. The air he had breathed was filled with particles of brick dust. He accepted faces, not one of which he would put a name to, and knew the smell and touch of wet raincoats worn by people he would never meet. In the streets of one place, Berlin, he walked on the dead, but both cities were built over annihilated walls scarcely anyone could remember. He knew that a lake is a lake – that is, a place to swim – and that parks and trees are good for children, but he had never known the name of a leaf or a tree until Moser’s widow began telling him, comparing one wild grass with another, picking a flower, showing its picture in a book. In the morning, standing beside him in the ravine on the far side of the house, she pointed to fields of white anemones that seemed covered with frost, and she gathered forget-me-nots, wild geranium, mauve and violet and pink, and valerian like lace, and mare’s-tails with fronds of green string. “The first plant life on earth,” said Katharine, bending down. For a reason he could not immediately interpret, the words, and the sight of the plant in Katharine’s hand, rushed him back to his mother screaming, and the wartime photograph of his father, which, of course, was mute.

  Wishing for life without its past, for immeasurable distance from the first life on earth, he groped to Sabine and Berlin instead of Katharine and now. In the short daydream, Sabine frowned and turned her head sharply, then felt among the clothes on the floor for a cigarette. She told Ramsay she had had one abortion and would probably never marry. Later, she said she would travel and try a different husband in every country. She was not the doting German girl his father’s crowd talked about in their anecdotes of the war. Her flat was shut up tight except when the janitor’s wife came to clean and flung the windows wide. The janitor’s wife was not concerned about Ramsay (who had not spent an entire night with a girl before) or Sabine dressed in two towels. “I saw a wild beast in the courtyard with black eyes, like an Italian,” she said, scrubbing the sink. This was the only house on the street older than Ramsay, and the courtyard was full of rats and secrets. When it rained the courtyard smelled of ashes. Laughing about the janitor’s wife and the Italian rat, Sabine stood naked before her mirror and said, “Look at how brown I am.” One of her admirers had given her a sunlamp.

  The first plant life on earth was spongy and weak; and the sun, in and out of clouds, sucked up every trace of color from Katharine Moser’s hair and hand and eyes. He had seen color paler than Katharine’s hand on angles of brick – was it paint splashed? Car lights washing by? There were no fissures in the brick, no space for fronds and stems, no room for leftovers. Why is brick ugly? Who says it is? Ramsay’s father knows how much gravel per cubic centimeter is needed for several different sorts of concrete; he wrote his thesis on this twenty years ago, when he came back from the war.

  “In Berlin,” Ramsay started to say – something about bright weeds growing – but Katharine saw a magpie. “This is their season,” she said. “They prey on fledglings.” She told of the shrike, the jay, but he was thinking about the black, red-brown, smoke-marked courtyard in Berlin, and Sabine, shivering because she was suddenly cold, tender when it was too late, when there was no need for tenderness, asking what she considered serious questions in her version of English: “Was that all? Worth it? All that important?” She was not looking into space but at a clock she could not bother winding that was stopped forever at six minutes to three.

  He and Katharine walked back to the lawn and the breakfast table, and she tipped her head like Sabine’s, though not in remembrance of pleasure, only because the sun was strong again. She spoke to the cook’s little boy, in straw hat and red shorts, pretending to garden; he was at their feet. Then behind and above them a branch rocked. It was Katharine’s cat attacking a nest. The fury of the baffle could be measured by the leaves rustling and thrashing in the windless day. A cat face the size of the moon must be over the nest; the eyes and the paws – there was no help for it – came through sunny leaves. The sky was behind the head. “Stop him, stop him!” Ramsay screamed like a girl or like a child.

  “Pip! Naughty Pip!” She clapped her hands. “He’s got one, I’m afraid.” She was not disturbed. Neither was the cook’s little boy, though he sucked his lip and stared up at the tree a moment more. “It is the cat’s nature,” she said. “Some things die – look at the spruce.” (To encourage him.) “We think it is dying, but those fresh bits are new.” The trees were devoured by something he did not understand – a web, a tent of gray, a hideous veil. The shadows netted on the breakfast table, on cups and milk and crumpled napkins, seemed a web to catch anything – lovers, stretched fingers, claws. He tried to see through Katharine’s eyes: the cat had its nature, and every living thing carried a name.

  “Do you notice that scent, Douglas? Does it bother you? It is the acacia flowering down the valley. Some people mind it. It gives them headaches. Poor Moser,” she said, of her late husband, the conductor, who had died at Christmas and would have been seventy-four this summer. “When he began having headaches he thought all trees were poisonous. He breathed through a scarf. That was the form his fears took.”

  “It’s only natural to be scared if you’re dying,” said Ramsay. He supposed this; until this moment he had not given it a thought.

  “Old people are afraid,” she said, as if she and Douglas were alike, without a time gap. (He had reckoned the difference in their ages to be twenty-five years.) “Although we’ll know one day,” she said, as if they would arrive at old age together. Lowering her voice, in case her adolescent daughter was spying and listening, she told how Moser had made her stop smoking. He did not want her to make a widower of him. He had chosen to marry Katharine because she was young, and he wished to be outlived. He was afraid of being alone. She, a mere child then, a little American girl nearly thirty but simple for her age, untalented, could not even play the piano, had been chosen by the great old man. But he forgot about being alone in eternity. “I told him,” she said, putting the wild flowers in a glass of water on the breakfast table. “Unless two people die at exactly the same moment, they can never meet again.” With such considerations had she entertained the ill old man. He had clasped her hands, weeping. His headache marched from the roots of his hair to his eyebrows, down the temples, around the eyes.

  Ramsay was careful how he picked his way through this. For all his early dash and promise he was as Canadian as his father, which is to say cautious and single-minded. He had a mother younger than Katharine, who began all her conver
sations on a deep and intimate level, as if coming up for air was a waste of time. That made him more prudent still. He said, “Those the acacias?”

  “The plum trees? They can’t be what you mean, surely. That’s the cuckoo you’re hearing, by the way. If you count the calls, you can tell how many years before you get married. Peggy and Anne count the whole day.” He considered the lunatic cuckoo, but having before him infinite time, he let the count trail off. The cook’s small boy, squatting over one mauled, exhausted, eternally transplanted geranium, heard Ramsay and Katharine, but they might have been cuckoos too for all he cared. The only English words he knew were “What’s that for?,” “Shut up,” and “Idiot.” This child, who was a pet of Katharine’s, lunched with the family. Until Ramsay had come, a few days ago, the boy had been the only man in the house. He sat on a cushion, an atlas, and a history of nineteenth-century painting, so as to reach the table, and he bullied and had his way; he had been obeyed and cherished by Katharine Moser and her daughter Anne; by fat Peggy Boon, who was Anne’s friend; and by Nanette Stein, who was Katharine’s. Now Ramsay was here, tall as a tree to the stooping child. When Ramsay said something to him, in French, he did not look, he went deaf, he muttered and sang to himself; and Ramsay, who had offered dominoes, and would have let the boy win the game, limped on up to the house, feeling wasted.

  Peggy Boon, fourteen, too plump and too boring to be a friend for Anne – unless Anne, already, chose her friends for contrast – had been mooning about the lawn ever since the storm ended, watching for Ramsay to come up the path. She let him look at the Mosers’ view a full minute, and then stepped round from behind a tree. She had been making up a poem, she said flutily. No one made up poetry; Ramsay had never seen anyone making up poems. He glared over her head. She stood there, straight of hair, small of eye, fat arms across new breasts she was flattening at night with a silk scarf – this information from Katharine, by way of Anne. She was an English rose, she feared silence, and pronounced her own name “Piggy.”