A Mixture of Frailties tst-3

by Robertson Davies

  Pondering on The First Violin, Monica hunted up the book, which she had not read for two or three years. What a very musical book it was! The chapters were headed, not with bits of poetry as in Francis Marion Crawford, many of whose works she had read in the set which had belonged to the dead high school teacher, but with quotations of music. She had played them all, but they were so short that they did not really mean much. One was called Träumerei, like the picture over the piano. She picked out the theme again, and it remained unrevealing as ever. She put the book aside and began to play. Turn to music when you are unhappy, dear; that was the frequent counsel of Aunt Ellen.

  She played Danse Macabre, for it reminded her of Domdaniel, and was besides a nice gloomy piece, suiting with her mood of romantic turmoil. She brought out very strongly the motif which her aunt had assured her was the rattling of dead men’s bones. It cheered her greatly, so she followed it with that sweet Flower Song by Gustave Lange, which was one of Aunt’s favourites. As she played, Miss Gall returned.

  It was always easy to talk to Aunt Ellen. She didn’t have to have things explained to her so much as Ma always did, and when she disagreed she never jeered, which was Ma’s way. Besides, Aunt Ellen was a specialist in romance and dreams, and she never seemed to think that anything was really impossible. When the wonderful news had come about the Bridgetower Trust, Aunt Ellen had not waited for Monica to suggest that this might be the pathway to the wonderful world of opera; she had been first to say it; she had led the way in marvellous speculation. There was no dream that had to be shielded from her, for fear that she might mock; she was eager for dreams, and provided cup after cup of the sweet, milky tea which she and Monica found so helpful in the dreaming game. But about family—well, even Aunt Ellen might not see what Monica was driving at there. And so Monica took what seemed to her to be a safe tack.

  “That boy I’ve sometimes spoken about, Auntie, George Medwall, said something to me today which made me as mad as hops.” And she gave a version of George’s few words which would have surprised him very much if he could have heard it. Monica had no intention of being untruthful; she merely told Aunt Ellen what George’s words had conveyed to her at the time, with certain accretions which had developed since.

  “Of course everything will be changed for you now, dear,” said Miss Gall, “and I dare say you will get into quite a different sort of life. But you were very right not to hear a word against your family. The Fifth Commandment is sacred; honour thy father and mother. As we grow older we see it more that way. Your parents have been very good to you.” As she spoke, Miss Gall cast about in her mind for concrete instances of this goodness, but could find nothing sufficiently impressive to bring out. “We never fully know what our parents have done for us,” she said, vaguely, and then added, finding safer ground, “I know my father and mother were very, very good to me, and I don’t suppose a day passes that I don’t remember them and feel their love for me, and my love for them, all over again.” She smiled; she had turned a difficult corner very neatly.

  “Yes, I know, Auntie, but they don’t really seem to like the idea that I’m going away to study music. Music isn’t real to them, the way it is to you and me. Ma never mentions it, except to make fun.”

  “Oh, you mustn’t mind your mother’s fun,” said Miss Gall. “She’s always been like that. So gay when she was a girl, and it’s grown with the years. That’s really wonderful, you know, dear. So many people get gloomy as they grow older. We always supposed that was what drew Alfred to her.”

  “Were they very much in love?” said Monica.

  “Well, dear, I really couldn’t say. I suppose they must have been. Alfred was very set on marrying her.”

  “Was Dad very ambitious, as a young man?”

  “Oh yes, I should certainly say he was. That was why he left school so young, you know. He wanted to be independent; he wanted to buy a car.”

  “Didn’t he have to leave school?”

  “Gracious, no; Father pleaded with him to stay at school. There was no need for him to leave; Father was doing quite well, you know. But Alfred would have his way. And then he would have his way about marrying. And so it went, you see.”

  “You mean his parents didn’t want him to marry Ma?”

  “They never discussed it with me, dear, but of course I couldn’t help picking up a little of what was going on. It all seemed to be hasty, and there were quarrels, and your Mother’s family—”

  “Yes? Go on, Aunt, what about them?”

  “Nothing dear, really. Just that they were rather strange people, and didn’t want your mother to marry anyone.”

  “They thought Dad wasn’t good enough? Was that it?”

  “No; if there was anything of that sort, it was on the Gall side. And of course my parents were disturbed that your Mother was quite a bit older than Alfred. But your Mother’s family were—oh, I guess you’ve said it all when you say they were odd.”

  “And Grandpa Gall didn’t want him to marry into such an odd family?”

  “Well, dear, parents often don’t see things as young people do. And it’s worked out very happily, so there’s no good in talking any more about it, is there? No good ever comes of criticizing people, or guessing what might have happened if they’d done something they didn’t do. We have to take care that we always do the right thing ourselves, don’t we? And what a job it is!”

  “But don’t you think George Medwall was terrible? I mean, hinting that home influence would hold me back, and all that. I think that’s a terrible thing to say to a person, don’t you?”

  “I suppose he doesn’t really understand. Of course, there will be changes in your life, and probably in the way you look at a lot of things. But I’m sure there’ll be nothing that your Father and Mother wouldn’t approve of. You know, dear—we’ve talked about it over and over again—a life given to music is such a wonderful thing. Living for a great art, and meeting wonderful, cultured people, and being all the time in contact with lovely things—it’s bound to change you. You’ll soar far above us I dare say.”

  “Oh, I won’t,” said Monica. “I’d hate to be like that. And I’d never feel I was above you, Aunt, never if I got to be the top soprano at the Metropolitan. It just wouldn’t be possible for me. You’ve taught me all I know about music; how to read and play the piano, and harmony and theory, and accompany myself, and everything. If it hadn’t been for you there just wouldn’t have been any music for me. I owe my chance to you! This Bridgetower Trust is really yours; you must know that. I couldn’t ever repay you, not if I lived to be a thousand and got to be the greatest singer in the world!”

  “You can repay me by being a great artist, dear. And a great artist is always a lovely person, remember that. The really great ones were always simple and fine, and loved everything that was sweet in life. Keep yourself sweet, Monny, and remember that any gifts you have really belong to God. If you do that, you won’t have to worry about me. I’ll be so proud of you, I’ll just be full of it all day and every day. And don’t worry about your parents. They’ll be proud, too. They’re just too shy to say how proud they are of you. And I know you’ll always be what they want you to be.”

  Miss Gall was capable of talking in this strain at length, and so was Monica, so their conversation was long, repetitious and vastly comforting. When Monica went home at last she was persuaded that, when the time came, Courvoisier and Ma could be very happily reconciled to one another. It was just a job of keeping your aims clear and your ideals high.

  3

  For several days it had been clear to Monica and her sister Alice that the farewell party was going to be one of Ma’s “nights”. Mrs Gall was a woman whose normal lethargy and low spirits were relieved, from time to time, by brief bouts of extreme gaiety. For weeks she would declare that she couldn’t be bothered with people—had no use for them at all, and didn’t want the house cluttered up with them; at these times she was morose, untidy and rather dirty in her dress, never too
k her hair out of curlers, wore her teeth only at meals and—the girls knew this but did not speak of it even to each other—did not wash very often. Then, suddenly, the cloud would lift, the hair would be released, the teeth brought out of the sweater pocket where they had lain unseen but not always unheard, and Mrs Gall would “doll up”, to use her own expression, and ask the girls, jeeringly, why they never brought anybody into the house? Did they want to send her crazy for lack of company? Then the baking would begin, and in a few days there would be a party, consisting chiefly of a Gargantuan feed, with Mrs Gall the heart and soul of it. For a day or two afterward she would exult, breaking into sudden laughter as she recalled the rare old time she had had. Then, in an hour or two, she would fall into a pit of gloom from which even Pastor Beamis, toiling manfully, could not lift her.

  She was conscious of this pattern in her life, and attributed it to her indifferent health. Everything she ate, she declared, ran to fat. She was a burden to herself; her breath was short, and she suspected the worst of her heart. From time to time she made attempts to get her fat down, picking at her food for a few days until she was so low in spirits that she would have a fit of weeping, and take a medicinal slice of pie. A doctor had once told her that sugar was a stimulant, and indeed it was to her; she resorted to it as a wealthier and more sophisticated invalid might have taken to a costly drug.

  Perhaps the most extraordinary manifestation of her depression was that while it lasted she refused to go to the services and prayer-meetings of the Thirteeners. Her faith was as strong as ever, she protested, but she couldn’t face the people; she simply wasn’t up to it. She could endure no one but her family, and toward them she was morose, demanding—in Alice’s word “cussed”. Pastor Beamis paid more sick-visits to her than to any other member of his flock.

  The quantity and elaboration of the baking that had gone on before the farewell party made it clear that Mrs Gall was going on the razzle as never before. It had been estimated that there would be, at the outside, twenty guests, and she had made ten large jellies, four layer-cakes, a fruit-cake, six dozen tarts and unnumbered cookies; in addition she had baked a ham and a turkey, made a mountain of potato salad, and had rifled her preserve cupboard to produce mustard pickles, chili sauce, pickled beetroot, pickled watermelon rind, pickled crabapples, pickled corn and pickled onions. A vast coffee urn had been borrowed from the Thirteeners’ church, and in addition there was to be a punch, made of cold tea, grape juice and ginger ale, with extra sugar to make it fizz.

  “I don’t want nobody goin’ home sayin; they didn’t get their bellyful,” she said, as she surveyed these provisions on the afternoon before the great event. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Monica wince, and Ma Gall was gratified. Although she could never have formulated such a theory, she had a deep conviction that there was something salty, honest and salutary about bad grammar; it checked a tendency in the girls to get stuck-up notions. She could speak as fancy as anybody when she chose, but she didn’t choose to indulge her daughters in this way. She deeply believed—though again this belief never jelled into anything so clear as a theory—that everybody, in their inmost thoughts, was ungrammatical, and that they translated those thoughts into fancy talk when they spoke, as a form of affectation. But they didn’t impose on her. No siree, Bob!

  “What are they going to do—besides eat themselves out of shape?” asked her daughter Alice.

  “Oh, they’ll find plenty to do. Somebody’ll know some games, or somethin’,” said Mrs Gall. “Why don’t you plan it, instead of leavin’ the whole thing to me?”

  “What can we do that anybody wants to do that Mrs Beamis won’t pull a long face at?” said Alice.

  “Alex and Kevin’ll have lotsa things planned, you’ll see,” said Mrs Gall. “They’re regular corkers, those two fellas. Laugh!—Say, will you ever forget the time they sneaked upstairs and got into a lot of your clothes and came down again like a couple of girls?” Mrs Gall laughed till she wheezed, turned a dirty red, and coughed deeply and ventriloquially, like a bull bellowing in a distant field.

  “Yes, and they burst two of my dresses under the arms,” said Alice, sourly. “Big sissies. It was a thrill for them to get into a girl’s stuff and mess around with it.”

  “Aw, they’re a great coupla boys,” said Mrs Gall. “They got some life in ‘em, and that’s what I like. Not always pilin’ on the agony till they’re so stiff-rumped they can’t have any fun.” Again her eye wandered to Monica, who, as the supposed guest of honour, was showing little zeal for the party which lay ahead.

  Night came, and with it the guests. Monica and Alice dressed in the small room which they had always shared, contriving somehow to make quite elaborate preparations in the two-foot gangway which was all the space left in the room between the double bed, the chest of drawers and the single chair. Alice depressed Monica by her unceasing gloomy predictions about the party. The elder of the two, Alice was the rebel; she was sick of the Thirteeners, and she was pretty sick of Ma. She was also sick of Monica, and the Bridgetower Trust had deepened her disgust with her sister’s pretensions to culture. Alice was noisily anti-intellectual, though she had no clear notion of what it was that she was opposing. She was convinced that music and all that stuff was a lot of bull, and that was all there was to the matter. She worked in a bank, and had plans to better herself. The first step in these plans, Chuck Proby by name, was coming to the party. He worked in the bank, too.

  “Chuck says all this religion is a lot of crap,” said Alice, putting as much colour on her mouth as she thought Ma would endure without noisy rebuke.

  “If Ma heard you use a word like that she’d wash your mouth out with soap,” said Monica, who was rubbing Italian Balm into her hands.

  “Ma’s no one to talk about the words anybody else uses. Did you hear what she said when she finished laying the table tonight? ‘There; let ‘em eat till they’re pukin’ sick’, that’s what she said. But the other day when I lost the heel off my shoe and said Damn she yelped about it for half an hour. No swearing—oh my, no!—but she’ll talk as common as she likes. But anyhow, Chuck says all this religion is a lot of crap. He says he’s a Probyite. He means by that he believes in himself. That’s what makes me so crazy about him. He’ll do something in the world. Not like Pa.”

  “Pa’s never had a real chance, Alice. He started to work at sixteen—” Monica’s voice died away, for she was remembering what her aunt had told her, what George had said—all the disturbing things which gnawed at Pa’s meagre personal legend. Alice was laughing.

  “Crap,” said she, “crapola!”

  4

  By nine o’clock the party was beginning to warm up. It had started badly, for the earliest guests to arrive were twelve young Thirteeners, the others in the sept of thirteen with which Monica, at puberty, had been received into the Beamis flock. They were evenly divided as to sex, and there were three couples among them who were supposed to be romantically interested in each other. But vitality did not seem to be a characteristic of young Thirteeners, and they were quiet, almost furtive, in their approach to merry-making. They hung about the walls, and said “Yes, thanks,” and “No, thanks,” when addressed, and showed a distressing tendency to whisper among themselves. Miss Ellen Gall had come early, but she was not one to make a party “go”, and thus the whole burden fell on Mrs Gall. She pumped up gusto enough for everybody, pressing the sweet punch and cookies on them as soon as they arrived, toiling round and round the room, sucking air through her false teeth, and shouting “Havin’ a good time? That’s right; enjoy yourselves!” in a way which made it clear that no lack of enjoyment would be tolerated. But the young Thirteeners were leavened after ten minutes by the arrival of Chuck Proby, who had a very worldly air, and then by Mrs Gall’s favourites, Alex Graham and Kevin Boyle.

  Alex and Kevin were close friends. They shared a boarding-house and, frequently, they shared a bed. They were happy together, giving each other advice about clothes, and helpin
g each other in the demanding task of setting their hair in becoming waves. Mrs Gall, it need hardly be said, knew nothing of these intimacies and failed to understand Alice’s broad hints; to her they were just a pair of vivacious boys who were always ready for fun, never spoke ill of anybody, and paid her flattering attentions. They were not Thirteeners, but they were pleasantly solemn about religion, and occasionally ventured philosophical reflections to the effect that there were a lot of things in the Universe that we didn’t understand yet, and that it stood to reason that there was Something at the back of the wonderful world which we saw all around us. In the circle in which the Galls moved, the subdivision of humankind to which Alex and Kevin belonged was not understood—and indeed, if its existence were recognized at all it was thought to appear only among people whom wealth or an unwholesome preoccupation with the arts had corrupted; true, they seemed a little girlish, but in Mrs Gall’s view there was nothing wrong with them that a couple of good wives couldn’t put right, and she was always on the lookout for suitable girls for them; she would have been well pleased if her own two daughters had fallen in with this plan. They were great ones to “josh” with her, and Mrs Gall could forgive anything in a josher. They made their entrance joshing.

  “Madame,” said Alex, seizing her hand and kissing it amorously, “the Count and I are too much honoured by the invitation to your soirée.”

  Kevin produced a bouquet of paper flowers from behind his back and presented it to his hostess. “Mine heart, she ees too full,” said he.

  Mrs Gall laughed, wheezed, and roared in her chest. “There you go!” she said, when she could speak; “I knew you two would be up to somethin’. Come on and have somep’n t’eat, and cut it out, now! Remember my heart.”