Home Truths

by Mavis Gallant

  “Think of your unfortunate parents,” Dr. Chauchard had said in the sort of language that had no meaning to me, though I am sure it was authentic to him.

  When he died and I read his obituary, I saw there had been still another voice. I was twenty and had not seen him since the age of nine. “The Doctor” and the red-covered books had been lost even before that, when during a major move from Montreal to a house in the country a number of things that belonged to me and that my parents were tired of seeing disappeared.

  There were three separate death notices, as if to affirm that Chauchard had been three men. All three were in a French newspaper; he neither lived nor died in English. The first was a jumble of family names and syntax: “After a serene and happy life it has pleased our Lord to send for the soul of his faithful servant Raoul Étienne Chauchard, piously deceased in his native city in his fifty-first year after a short illness comforted by the sacraments of the Church.” There followed a few particulars – the date and place of the funeral, and the names and addresses of the relatives making the announcement. The exact kinship of each was mentioned: sister, brother-in-law, uncle, nephew, cousin, second cousin.

  The second obituary, somewhat longer, had been published by the medical association he belonged to; it described all the steps and stages of his career. There were strings of initials denoting awards and honors, ending with: “Dr. Chauchard had also been granted the Medal of Epidemics (Belgium).” Beneath this came the third notice: “The Arts and Letters Society of Quebec announces the irreparable loss of one of its founder members, the poet R.É. Chauchard.” R.É. had published six volumes of verse, a book of critical essays, and a work referred to as “the immortal ‘Progress,’ ” which did not seem to fall into a category or, perhaps, was too well known to readers to need identification.

  That third notice was an earthquake, the collapse of the cities we build over the past to cover seams and cracks we cannot account for. He must have been writing when my parents knew him. Why they neglected to speak of it is something too shameful to dwell on; he probably never mentioned it, knowing they would believe it impossible. French books were from France; English books from England or the United States. It would not have entered their minds that the languages they heard spoken around them could be written, too.

  I met by accident years after Dr. Chauchard’s death one of Mrs. Erskine’s ex-minnesingers, now an elderly bachelor. His name was Louis. He had never heard of Paul-Armand, not even by rumor. He had not known my parents and was certain he had never accompanied Dr. Chauchard and Mrs. Erskine to our house. He said that when he met these two he had been fresh from a seminary, aged about nineteen, determined to live a life of ease and pleasure but not sure how to begin. Mrs. Erskine had by then bought and converted a farmhouse south of Montreal, where she wove carpets, hooked rugs, scraped and waxed old tables, kept bees, and bottled tons of pickled beets, preparing for some dark proletarian future should the mob – the horde, “those people” – take over after all. Louis knew the doctor only as the poet R.É. of the third notice. He had no knowledge of the Medal of Epidemics (Belgium) and could not explain it to me. I had found “Progress” by then, which turned out to be R.É.’s diary. I could not put faces to the X, Y, and Z that covered real names, nor could I discover any trace of my parents, let alone of ma chère petite Linnet. There were long thoughts about Mozart – people like that.

  Louis told me of walking with Mrs. Erskine along a snowy road close to her farmhouse, she in a fur cape that came down to her boot tops and a fur bonnet that hid her braided hair. She talked about her unusual life and her two husbands and about what she now called “the predicament.” She told him how she had never been asked to meet Madame Chauchard mère and how she had slowly come to realize that R.É. would never marry. She spoke of people who had drifted through the predicament, my mother among them, not singling her out as someone important, just as a wisp of cloud on the edge of the sky. “Poor Charlotte” was how Mrs. Erskine described the thin little target on which she had once trained her biggest guns. Yet “poor Charlotte” – not even an X in the diary, finally – had once been the heart of the play. The plot must have taken a full turning after she left the stage. Louis became a new young satellite, content to circle the powerful stars, to keep an eye on the predicament, which seemed to him flaming, sulphurous. Nobody ever told him what had taken place in the first and second acts.

  Walking, he and Mrs. Erskine came to a railway track quite far from houses, and she turned to Louis and opened the fur cloak and said, smiling, “Viens voir Mrs. Erskine.” (Owing to the Ursuline lisp this must have been “Mitheth Erthkine.”) Without coyness or any more conversation she lay down – he said “on the track,” but he must have meant near it, if you think of the ties. Folded into the cloak, Louis at last became part of a predicament. He decided that any further experience could only fall short of it, and so he never married.

  In this story about the cloak Mrs. Erskine is transmuted from the pale, affected statue I remember and takes on a polychrome life. She seems cheerful and careless, and I like her for that. Carelessness might explain her unreliable memory about Charlotte. And yet not all that careless: “She even knew the train times,” said Louis. “She must have done it before.” Still, on a sharp blue day, when some people were still in a dark classroom writing “abyssus abyssum invocat” all over their immortal souls, she, who had been through this and escaped with nothing worse than a lisp, had the sun, the snow, the wrap of fur, the bright sky, the risk. There is a raffish kind of nerve to her, the only nerve that matters.

  For that one conversation Louis and I wondered what our appearance on stage several scenes apart might make us to each other: if A was the daughter of B, and B rattled the foundations of C, and C, though cautious and lazy where women were concerned, was committed in a way to D, and D was forever trying to tell her life’s story to E, the husband of B, and E had enough on his hands with B without taking on D, too, and if D decided to lie down on or near a railway track with F, then what are A and F? Nothing. Minor satellites floating out of orbit and out of order after the stars burned out. Mrs. Erskine reclaimed Dr. Chauchard but he never married anyone. Angus reclaimed Charlotte but he died soon after. Louis, another old bachelor, had that one good anecdote about the fur cloak. I lost even the engraving of “The Doctor,” spirited away quite shabbily, and I never saw Dr. Chauchard again or even tried to. What if I had turned up one day, aged eighteen or so, only to have him say to his nurse, “Does anyone know she’s here?”

  When I read the three obituaries it was the brass plate on the door I saw and “Sur Rendez-vous.” That means “no dropping in.” After the warning came the shut heron door and the shut swan door and, at another remove, the desk with the circle of lamplight and R.É. himself, writing about X, Y, Z, and Mozart. A bit humdrum perhaps, a bit prosy, not nearly as good as his old winter Saturday self, but I am sure that it was his real voice, the voice that transcends this or that language. His French-speaking friends did not hear it for a long time (his first book of verse was not sold to anyone outside his immediate family), while his English-speaking friends never heard it at all. But I should have heard it then, at the start, standing on tiptoe to reach the doorbell, calling through the letter box every way I could think of, “I, me.” I ought to have heard it when I was still under ten and had all my wits about me.

  With a Capital T

  FOR MADELEINE AND JEAN-PAUL LEMIEUX

  In wartime, in Montreal, I applied to work on a newspaper. Its name was The Lantern, and its motto, “My light shall shine,” carried a Wesleyan ring of veracity and plain dealing. I chose it because I thought it was a place where I would be given a lot of different things to do. I said to the man who consented to see me, “But not the women’s pages. Nothing like that.” I was eighteen. He heard me out and suggested I come back at twenty-one, which was a soft way of getting rid of me. In the meantime I was to acquire experience; he did not say of what kind. On the stroke of twenty-
one I returned and told my story to a different person. I was immediately accepted; I had expected to be. I still believed, then, that most people meant what they said. I supposed that the man I had seen that first time had left a memorandum in the files: “To whom it may concern – Three years from this date, Miss Linnet Muir will join the editorial staff.” But after I’d been working for a short time I heard one of the editors say, “If it hadn’t been for the god-damned war we would never have hired even one of the god-damned women,” and so I knew.

  In the meantime I had acquired experience by getting married. I was no longer a Miss Muir, but a Mrs. Blanchard. My husband was overseas. I had longed for emancipation and independence, but I was learning that women’s autonomy is like a small inheritance paid out a penny at a time. In a journal I kept I scrupulously noted everything that came into my head about this, and about God, and about politics. I took it for granted that our victory over Fascism would be followed by a sunburst of revolution – I thought that was what the war was about. I wondered if going to work for the capitalist press was entirely moral. “Whatever happens,” I wrote, “it will be the Truth, nothing half-hearted, the Truth with a Capital T.”

  The first thing I had to do was write what goes under the pictures. There is no trick to it. You just repeat what the picture has told you like this:

  “Boy eats bun as bear looks on.”

  The reason why anything has to go under the picture at all is that a reader might wonder, “Is that a bear looking on?” It looks like a bear, but that is not enough reason for saying so. Pasted across the back of the photo you have been given is a strip of paper on which you can read: “Saskatoon, Sask. 23 Nov. Boy eats bun as bear looks on.” Whoever composed this knows two things more than you do – a place and a time.

  You have a space to fill in which the words must come out even. The space may be tight; in that case, you can remove “as” and substitute a comma, though that makes the kind of terse statement to which your reader is apt to reply, “So what?” Most of the time, the Truth with a Capital T is a matter of elongation: “Blond boy eats small bun as large bear looks on.”

  “Blond boy eats buttered bun …” is livelier, but unscrupulous. You have been given no information about the butter. “Boy eats bun as hungry bear looks on” has the beginnings of a plot, but it may inspire your reader to protest: “That boy must be a mean sort of kid if he won’t share his food with a starving creature.” Child-lovers, though less prone to fits of anguish than animal-lovers, may be distressed by the word “hungry” for a different reason, believing “boy” subject to attack from “bear.” You must not lose your head and type, “Blond bear eats large boy as hungry bun looks on,” because your reader may notice, and write a letter saying, “Some of you guys around there think you’re pretty smart, don’t you?” while another will try to enrich your caption with, “Re your bun write-up, my wife has taken better pictures than that in the very area you mention.”

  At the back of your mind, because your mentors have placed it there, is an obstruction called “the policy factor.” Your paper supports a political party. You try to discover what this party has had to say about buns and bears, how it intends to approach them in the future. Your editor, at golf with a member of parliament, will not want to have his game upset by: “It’s not that I want to interfere but some of that bun stuff seems pretty negative to me.” The young and vulnerable reporter would just as soon not pick up the phone to be told, “I’m ashamed of your defeatist attitude. Why, I knew your father! He must be spinning in his grave!” or, more effectively, “I’m telling you this for your own good – I think you’re subversive without knowing it.”

  Negative, defeatist and subversive are three of the things you have been cautioned not to be. The others are seditious, obscene, obscure, ironic, intellectual and impulsive.

  You gather up the photo and three pages of failed captions, and knock at the frosted glass of a senior door. You sit down and are given a view of boot soles. You say that the whole matter comes down to an ethical question concerning information and redundancy; unless “reader” is blotto, can’t he see for himself that this is about a boy, a bun, and a bear?

  Your senior person is in shirtsleeves, hands clasped behind his neck. He thinks this over, staring at the ceiling; swings his feet to the floor; reads your variations on the bear-and-bun theme; turns the photo upside-down. He tells you, patiently, that it is not the business of “reader” to draw conclusions. Our subscribers are not dreamers or smart alecks; when they see a situation in a picture, they want that situation confirmed. He reminds you about negativism and obscuration; advises you to go sit in the library and acquire a sense of values by reading the back issues of Life.

  The back numbers of Life are tatty and incomplete, owing to staff habits of tearing out whatever they wish to examine at leisure. A few captions, still intact, allow you to admire a contribution to pictorial journalism, the word “note”:

  “American flag flies over new post office. Note stars on flag.”

  “GI waves happily from captured Italian tank. Note helmet on head.”

  So, “Boy eats bun as bear looks on. Note fur on bear.” All that can happen now will be a letter asking, “Are you sure it was a bun?”

  From behind frosted-glass doors, as from a leaking intellectual bath, flow instructions about style, spelling, caution, libel, brevity, and something called “the ground rules.” A few of these rules have been established for the convenience of the wives of senior persons and reflect their tastes and interests, their inhibitions and fears, their desire to see close friends’ pictures when they open to the social page, their fragile attention span. Other rules demand that we pretend to be independent of British foreign policy and American commerce – otherwise our readers, discouraged, will give up caring who wins the war. (Soon after victory British foreign policy will cease to exist; as for American commerce, the first grumbling will be heard when a factory in Buffalo is suspected of having flooded the country with defective twelve-inch pie tins.) Ground rules maintain that you must not be flippant about the Crown – an umbrella term covering a number of high-class subjects, from the Royal Family to the nation’s judicial system – or about our war effort or, indeed, our reasons for making any effort about anything. Religions, in particular those observed by decent Christians, are not up for debate. We may, however, describe and denounce marginal sects whose puritanical learnings are even more dizzily slanted than our own. The Jehovah’s Witnesses, banned as seditious, continue to issue inflammatory pamphlets about Jesus; patriotic outrage abounds over this. The children of Witnesses are beaten up in public schools for refusing to draw Easter bunnies. An education officer, interviewed, declares that the children’s obstinate observance of the Second Commandment is helping Hitler. Everyone knows that the Easter bunny, along with God and Santa Claus, is on our side.

  To argue a case for the children is defeatist; to advance reasons against their persecution is obscure. Besides, your version of the bunny conflict may be unreliable. Behind frosted-glass doors lurk male fears of female mischief. Women, having no inborn sense of history, are known to invent absurd stories. Celebrated newspaper hoaxes (perpetrated by men, as it happens) are described to you, examples of irresponsible writing that have brought down trusting editors. A few of these stories have been swimming, like old sea turtles, for years now, crawling ashore wherever British possessions are still tinted red on the map. “As the niece of the Governor-General rose from a deep curtsey, the Prince, with the boyish smile that has made him the darling of five continents, picked up a bronze bust of his grandmother and battered Lady Adeline to death” is one version of a perennial favorite.

  Privately, you think you could do better. You will never get the chance. The umpires of ground rules are nervous and watchful behind those doors. Wartime security hangs heavy. So does the fear that the end of hostilities will see them turfed out to make way for war correspondents wearing nonchalant mustaches, battered caps, carel
essly-knotted white scarves, raincoats with shoulder tabs, punctuating their accounts of Hunnish atrocities perceived at Claridges and the Savoy with “Roger!” and “Jolly-oh!” and “Over to you!”

  Awaiting this dreadful invasion the umpires sit, in shirtsleeves and braces, scribbling initials with thick blue pencils. “NDG” stands for “No Damned Good.” (Clairvoyant, you will begin to write “NBF” in your journal meaning “No Bloody Future.”) As a creeping, climbing wash of conflicting and contradictory instructions threatens to smother you, you discover the possibilities of the quiet, or lesser, hoax. Obeying every warning and precept, you will write, turn in, and get away with, “Dressed in shoes, stockings and hat appropriate to the season, Mrs. Horatio Bantam, the former Felicity Duckpond, grasped the bottle of champagne in her white-gloved hand and sent it swinging against the end of HMCS Makeweight that was nearest the official party, after which, swaying slightly, she slid down the ways and headed for open waters.”

  As soon as I realized that I was paid about half the salary men were earning, I decided to do half the work. I had spent much of my adolescence as a resourceful truant, evolving the good escape dodges that would serve one way and another all my life. At The Lantern I used reliable school methods. I would knock on a glass door – a door that had nothing to do with me.

  “Well, Blanchard, what do you want?”

  “Oh, Mr. Watchmaster – it’s just to tell you I’m going out to look something up.”

  “What for?”

  “An assignment.”