Each Man's Son

by Hugh Maclennan

  The nurse told him the place in his side where the stitches had already been taken out was almost healed and if the doctor said so, he could leave the hospital in a few more days.

  The few days passed and now they were beginning the third week of July. Dr. Ainslie gave Alan a final examination, his mother arrived, and that afternoon Alan was driven home. When he got back to the house in the miners’ row it seemed much smaller than he remembered it, and his mother seemed much younger and even prettier. He wanted to be measured because he was sure he had grown several inches in the hospital. But when she stood him up beside the panel where all his marks of growth were kept, they found he was only half an inch taller than the last time she had measured him, and that was three months ago.

  “Father won’t be so pleased with me when he comes home,” he said, and watched her face.

  But she turned her back and pulled something from a cupboard and he couldn’t tell what she was thinking, or even if she had heard him.

  Twenty-Three

  IF GOD LOOKED DOWN on them that summer, the kind of God their ministers had told them about, He must have been well pleased, for by summer’s end all of them except Alan were conscious of their sins. Longing to do their best, they had discovered there is no best in this world. Yearning for love, they had found loneliness. Eager to help one another, they had made each other wretched. Dreaming of better lives, they had become totally discontented with the lives they led.

  If an omnipotent and interested God looked down on them that summer, irony must have been one of His pleasures. For here in Cape Breton were these innocent ones, eager to make themselves worthy of the great world of Europe from which their ancestors had been driven long ago; and there across the sea was that great world of Europe, enjoying the final summer of its undisturbed arrogance. For this was the year before 1914.

  In Cape Breton it was a lovely season, the kind people talk about for years afterwards. There were no storms throughout the whole of August, the Bras d’Or was golden in long afternoons, the shadows of cumulus clouds moved with stately grandeur across the hills of the Margaree and the tides rose and fell under the spell of the moon. In such a summer even Broughton became almost beautiful.

  During Alan’s days in the hospital, Ainslie had watched a child’s mind respond like a plant to the nourishment he gave it. The joy he found in Alan was a real joy, and for a time it was almost an assuagement of his inherent loneliness. Alan would succeed where he had failed. Instead of looking forward each year to another blank wall of work, each year now he would see Alan grow, change and develop, and the future would become a garden instead of a desert. Alan would become more than a foster son; he would become a purpose in life.

  It was only when Alan went home from the hospital that Ainslie was opposed by the strength of recalcitrant facts. How was he to see the boy without creating a crisis?

  He solved this problem by persuading Mollie that he would like to keep an eye on Alan for a few weeks in order to build up his strength, and to that end Alan must have his noon meal with them, then a nap, and in the afternoons some supervised exercise. He noticed–and refused to let himself think about it–that this suggestion disturbed Mollie profoundly, but he was the doctor and she was the patient’s mother, and whatever her objections were, she did not voice them. He also noticed that Margaret showed no enthusiasm for his arrangements.

  But Margaret did not interfere with his plans. She saw that Alan had the food Ainslie prescribed and she made no comment on his excessive preoccupation with the boy. She herself was subject to a sense of guilt this summer. Hers was the subterranean guilt of failure which every childless woman knows. Now it was sharpened by her husband’s growing fondness for another woman’s son and by a return of the conviction she had tried so hard to bury: that it was more his fault than hers that they were childless. Dr. Dougald had told her that the operation performed on her had been both necessary and honorable, but this did not remove her knowledge that for several years before that operation, in the early part of their marriage, she and Dan could have had at least one child and perhaps two, if he had really wanted one enough. But those were the days when she had taken life as it came and when Daniel had determined to put his profession ahead of all other things in his life. This summer was made no easier for her by the realization that she could become as fond of Alan as her husband was, were it not for her own pride and her constant awareness that Alan was Mollie’s son, not hers.

  So they lived in a miasma of unspoken hopes, fears, hurts and misunderstandings. If either Margaret or Mollie had shown the doctor her inner dismay over the manner in which he was taking them both for granted, he might have decided his dilemma by the ruthless opposition of one duty to another and by making a clean choice. But neither woman, for separate reasons, said anything to bring him face to face with the facts. So Ainslie made the mistake of thinking that their silence signified surrender to his will. Like most men who appear outwardly strong, he had overlooked the strange and mysterious strength of the weak.

  It was Mollie who overthrew him. One morning after he had left for the hospital, Mollie presented herself at the surgery door. She had left Alan in her own house, studying a boy’s history the doctor had given him. When Margaret opened the door and saw who was on the step, she suppressed an impulse to shut it again, for her instinct had long ago told her that so far as Daniel was concerned, Mollie was her enemy. But Margaret believed in looking problems in the face once they had forced themselves upon her, so she invited the girl in.

  Then Margaret had to wait while Mollie tried to explain her visit through the usual Gaelic reticences, until finally the girl broke into tears.

  “It’s only because I am so frightened,” Mollie said, dabbing at her eyes.

  Margaret looked at the girl for a moment and resisted an impulse to despise her for her helplessness. “Come into the kitchen with me,” she said. “Let’s make some tea. As a matter of fact, I’m frightened, too.”

  Mollie said nothing more while Margaret moved about the big sunny room and set out cups and saucers on the scrubbed pine table. She left the girl in silence while they both drank the fragrant liquid as they sat on opposite ends of the table, and Margaret thought how alike–apart from the girl’s difference in education–Daniel and Mollie were. Both were capable of the infinite self-deception of the Celt. Both were alarmed by plain words and clear-cut alternatives. Both resembled animals in the mediumlike way they managed to sense others and take it for granted that others would be equally capable of sensing themselves.

  “I’m going to string some beans,” Margaret said. “Perhaps you’d like to help me. Here–put them in this bowl and we’ll put the strings on the paper. Now–what has made you frightened? We may well be frightened by the same thing, you know.”

  Eventually Mollie found her way through a number of hesitations until she was saying the words she had come to say. “Archie left me just like my father said he would, Mrs. Ainslie. We married because we had to marry, or my father would have died of the shame. But Archie liked me once and I always thought he meant it when he said he would come back. Now the doctor says it would be a terrible thing for Alan if he does come back, and about that the doctor is right. I wanted Alan to be proud of Archie and to think he had a wonderful father because to the other boys he did not seem to have a father at all. But the doctor is right–if Archie came back now I don’t know what would happen to Alan. So I wrote and told him I never wanted to see him again.”

  When her husband’s name was mentioned, Margaret glanced up, then looked quickly down at the beans again.

  “It is wonderful, Mrs. Ainslie, what the doctor has been doing for us. He is so clever and so much older, and Alan is growing fast. It is only–Mrs. Ainslie, Alan comes home from here every day and talks to me about the fine things the doctor says he is going to do for him. He even talks about going away to school someday and then going to a college in England. And now–now I am frightened!”

  Again Marg
aret glanced up. She remembered the evening of their drive into Broughton two months ago. The girl had seemed so gay and fresh then. She had possessed the graciousness of all things living within their own right. She had been warm, loving and beautiful. What difference did it make if she was only a child living with an illusion? Her ignorance gave Daniel no right to tear away her illusion and leave her with nothing in its place.

  “Go on, Mollie,” she said quietly.

  “It used to be his father Alan looked forward to, but now–Mrs. Ainslie, how can Alan have those things the doctor tells him about? When he finds out he cannot have them, it will be terrible for him. I do not want Alan to go into the mine, and I am going to find a way so he will never have to do it, but now he talks always about the doctor, saying he is going to be famous one day. And that is not right because it is not true.” She began to cry again. “I do not mean to be saying these things. The doctor has meant to be good to us. But I am so frightened, for the doctor has never thought about me in what he is doing to Alan.”

  Margaret stopped stringing the beans and put her hands on the table, as though the sight of their firmness would help to calm the girl. For she realized that she herself was afraid no longer.

  “Since you’ve told me this much,” she said, “perhaps you’d better tell me some more.”

  Mollie looked at her with tragic eyes. “I did a bad thing once, Mrs. Ainslie. But after Alan was born, I thought it could not have been wicked after all. For how could a boy like Alan come from what was bad? But now I don’t know what to do, for the doctor has made it so I hardly know where to turn. I have been living alone so long, and everyone knows it and knows I don’t count.”

  “Tell me about Louis Camire,” Margaret said quietly. “He’s a friend of yours, isn’t he?”

  Mollie dropped her eyes. “Before this summer he was just a friend and that was all.”

  “What do you mean by that? Are you living together now?”

  “He would like me to. And he would like to take Alan and me to France.”

  A light shone in Margaret’s mind. At last she seemed to see a way out of the intolerable confusion of this summer. As it was her nature to abhor confusion of any kind, she was quick to take the opportunity offered. Gaelic as she was, Mollie was in quest of her advice and moral approval, and Margaret knew it.

  “Well, you’d like that, wouldn’t you?” she said. “It would mean that Alan would never have to go into the mines. From what I’ve seen of Louis Camire, he seems a decent man of some education. So all your troubles would be over.”

  “Except for Archie. Louis says if he does not answer my letter it will mean he has deserted us and then I can go with him and take Alan away from here. Louis says anyone here who is any good goes to the States, so why should not Alan go to France?”

  Margaret looked up at the clock and again set to work with the beans. When they were finished and she had put them on to boil, she smiled at Mollie and put her arm about the girl’s thin shoulders.

  “Everything is going to be all right,” she said. “Alan will be here soon and you don’t want him to know we’ve been talking. We won’t tell him our plans, either. It will only confuse him to think about something else right now.”

  Mollie looked relieved as she left the house, and Margaret returned to the kitchen to finish preparations for the lunch. She found herself humming for the first time in weeks, and then she began to sing. It was only when she was setting the table in the dining room and pouring Alan’s milk into a tumbler that her sense of guilt returned to the surface of her mind, and returned with violence.

  Now she could pin it directly upon an act of which she was acutely ashamed. She, the doctor’s wife, had used her authority to send Mollie away with tacit approval of an act which would be momentarily convenient to herself, but which in its final results might damage them all. She told herself it was Daniel’s blind obsession which had driven Mollie to Camire this summer. That was true enough, but she knew it had been her own words which would seal the relationship. How would Alan fare with that conceited little Frenchman as a stepfather, in a country so far away? And what of Archie in all this, Archie, the broken-down fighter? He was still Mollie’s husband. Undoubtedly he was barbarous, but he was a Highlander like the rest of them here. If Daniel Ainslie, four generations removed from Scotland, could still think of Scotland as his sacred mother country, Archie MacNeil would hardly forget Cape Breton. Why did they all assume that he would never come home just because he had been away four years and living a savage kind of existence nobody in Broughton could understand? What, most important of all, had she done to Daniel? What kind of despair would he be thrown into when he discovered that she had helped Mollie reach a decision which would send her off with the little Frenchman he despised, and remove Alan from his influence forever?

  But Margaret soon calmed herself. Daniel might rage. To those who did not know him he might at times seem hysterical, but deep in his core was a hard rock which had not been cracked. He had never in his life failed in a crisis. After the frenzy passed he would bury himself in his work. And later in London, if Dougald MacKenzie’s plans worked out, when at last he found himself with men of his own professional stature, away from Cape Breton with its memories and haunted Calvinism, they could begin a new kind of life together.

  So Margaret reasoned with herself, but her feeling of shame remained, and with it a ponderous foreboding. She sensed, without having to put the thought into words, since the religion common to Daniel and herself had performed that task for her in her childhood, that the essence of sin is a willful and inextricable involvement of the self in the lives of other people.

  Twenty-Four

  EVER SINCE HIS FIGHT with Packy Miller, Archie seemed to have been living in a steam bath. It had been hot in Utica, where he had gone in hope of a fight which had not materialized. It had been hotter still in Buffalo, where something peculiar had happened to him on the street, and he had come to himself in a precinct station with a kindly man in police uniform bending over him and asking his name. Now he was in Montreal, had been here a fortnight, and it was the hottest place he had ever known in his life.

  As Archie walked down the curving slope of Beaver Hall Hill his open pores were saturating his only suit of clothes. The worsted between his shoulderblades showed a dark patch of sweat and he could feel the cloth clinging stickily to the insides of his thighs. He walked through Victoria Square and turned into St. James Street, entered a large, cement-fronted building and rode up five floors in an elevator to the office of Raoul Picotte, the chief boxing promoter in the Province of Quebec.

  He gave his name to a dark-haired girl and sat down in the outer office waiting for Picotte to receive him. Over his head was a framed photograph of a hockey team, with Picotte standing at the end of a line of bulky players, wearing a fur cap. Two stenographers sat behind a wooden railing with idle machines in front of them and chattered in French while Archie waited. He sat there still and loose in his sweaty clothes. He looked over the girls’ heads through the window to the gray flank of a large grain elevator. Though the distance between himself and the elevator was barely a hundred yards, it looked flat and its edges seemed fuzzy.

  The door of the inner office opened and a well-groomed man with iron-gray hair stood there. Raoul Picotte had carefully manicured hands and small feet in pointed shoes. When Archie saw him he thought he must have come to the wrong office, for he had never seen a fight promoter who looked like this.

  “So you’re Archie MacNeil?” Picotte’s English was perfect. “Come inside.”

  Archie went through the open door and took a chair facing Picotte’s desk. It looked more familiar here, for the walls were hung with photographs of boxers in fighting stances. They all looked indistinct to Archie, but he recognized Jack Johnson by his color and Jack Dillon by the stance he had studied for years. Picotte sat behind his desk and looked Archie over with a long, appraising stare.

  “So you think you deserve a ch
ance at Eugene Masson’s Canadian title, eh?”

  “It iss what I came here for.”

  “It’s a pity you did not come two years ago when I wanted you.”

  “I am here now. Iss that not good enough for you?”

  Picotte smiled. “Tell me, Archie–why did you break up with Downey?”

  “Because he iss a son of a bitch.”

  Picotte gave him a penetrating stare. “Have you ever seen Eugene fight?”

  “I ha? been in the States four years. How whould I be seeing him fight, when he hass fought no place but here?”

  Picotte smiled again. “Just tell me something, Archie–what gives you the idea you’re worth a shot at Eugene’s title?”

  A slow anger kindled the redness around Archie’s eyes. “While he picked the safe ones, I wass fighting the best there iss. By Chesus, in one year I fought more than he did in hiss whole life.”

  “There’s not much argument about that,” said Picotte dryly. He opened a silver case and extracted a cigarette. While lighting it, he said with his eyes screwed up against the smart of the smoke, “Eugene’s fast. Nobody has ever knocked him out.”

  “Sure he hass neffer been knocked owt. Why should he be knocked owt, when he fights nobody with a punch and does nothing but dance?”

  Picotte’s shrewd eyes softened. He got up and went to the window. “Come over here, Archie.”

  Archie got up and joined him. His suit was still clinging to his skin and he felt dull and heavy in the head. He remembered having felt that way in Buffalo before he woke up in the police station. What he needed was a spell of training and regular meals to get the lead out of his bones. He had never been in so bad a shape as he was in now. It took most of what he had to get out of bed in the morning, and the last two weeks of stevedoring had left him exhausted. He did not notice how Picotte’s shrewd eyes watched him as he lumbered around the corner of the desk.