Home Truths (7 page)

“As you get old you lose everything,” he says. “You lose your God, if you ever had one. When you know they want you to die, you want to live. You want to be loved. Even that.”

His children are so embarrassed, so humiliated, they feel as if ashes and sand were being ground in their skins. The sons-in-law are revolted. They look at their plates. Honestly, they can never come to this house without something being said about religion or something personal.

“You lose your parents,” the old man continues. “You have to outlive them. Everything is loss.” Before they can say “nobody cares” he is off once more: “No need for priests,” he mutters. “If there is no sin, then no need for redemption. Dead words. Tell me, Father whoever you are,” (he asks the glass dish of fruit) “will you explain why these words should be used?” Muttering – he has been muttering all his life.

“Oh, shut up,” they are thinking. A chorus of silent English: “Shut up!” If only the old man could hear the words, he would see a great black wall; he would hear a sigh, a rattle, like the black trees outside the windows, hitting the panes.

The old man shakes his head over his plate: No, no, he never wanted to marry. He wanted to become a priest. Either God is, or He is not. If He is, I shall live for Him. If He is not, I shall fight His ghost. At forty-nine he was married off by a Jesuit, who was an old school friend. He and the shy, soft, orphaned girl who had been placed in a convent at six, and had left it, now, at eighteen, exchanged letters about comparative religion. She seemed intelligent – he has forgotten now what
he imagined their life could ever be like. Presently what they had in common was her physical horror of him and his knowledge of it, and then they had in common all their children.

W
hen the old man had finished his long thoughts, everyone except Gérard and Father Zinkin had disappeared. The small children were made to kiss him – moist reluctant mouths on his cheek – “before Granpa takes his nap.” Léopold, who never touched anyone, looked at him briefly through his new camera and said softly to him, and only to him,
“Il n’y a pas assez de lumière.”
Their dark identical eyes reflected each other. Then everyone vanished, the women to rattle plates in the kitchen, Léopold to his room, the five fathers to play some game with the children at the back of the house. He sat in his leather armchair, sometimes he slept, and he heard Gérard protesting, “I know the difference between seeing and dreaming.”

“Well, it was a waking dream,” said the priest. “There is no snow on the streets, but you say there had been a storm.”

The old man looked. The white light in the room surely was the reflection of a snowy day? The room seemed filled with white furniture, white flowers. The priest, because he was dressed like Gérard, tried to sound like a young man and an old friend. Only when the priest turned his head, seeking an ashtray, did the old man see what Father Zinkin knew. His interest in Gérard was intellectual. His mind was occupied with its own power. The old man imagined him, narrow, suspicious, in a small parish, lording it over a flock of old maids. They were thin, their eyebrows met over their noses.

Gérard said, “All right, what if I was analyzed? What difference would it make?”

“You would be yourself. You would be yourself
without effort.”

The old man had been waiting for him to say, “it would break the mirror”; for what is the good of being yourself, if you are Gérard?

“What I mean is, you can’t understand about this girl. So there’s no use talking about her.”

“I know about girls,” said the other. “I went out. I even danced.”

It struck the old man how often he had been told by priests they knew about life because they had, once, danced with girls. He was willing to let them keep that as a memory of life, but what about Gérard, as entangled with a woman as a man of thirty? But then Gérard lost interest and said, “I’d want to be analyzed in French,” so it didn’t matter.

“It wouldn’t work. Your French isn’t spontaneous enough. Now, begin again. You were on the street, it was daylight, then you were in the kitchen in the dark.”

How the old man despised this self-indulgence! He felt it was not his business to put a stop to it. His wife stopped it simply by coming in and beginning to talk about herself. When she talked about her children she seemed to be talking about herself, and when the priest said, to console some complaint she was making, “The little one will be brilliant,” meaning Léopold, he seemed to be prophesying a future in which she would shine. Outside, the others were breaking up into groups, carrying cots, ushering children into cars. It would take a good ten minutes, and so she sat perched on the arm of a sofa with her hat on her head and her coat on her arm, and
said, “Léopold will be brilliant, but I never wanted him. I’d had six children, five close together. French Canadians of our background, for I daren’t say class, it sounds so … Well, we, people like ourselves, do
not
usually have these monstrous families, regardless of what you may have been told, Father. My mother had no one but me, and when she tried having a second child, it killed her. When I knew I was having Léopold I took ergot. I lay here, on this very sofa, in the middle of the afternoon. Nothing happened, and nothing showed. He was born without even a strawberry mark to condemn me.”

She likes to shock, the old man remembered. How much you can take is measure of your intelligence. So she thinks. Oddly enough, she can be shocked.

She stopped speaking and sighed and smoothed the collar of her coat. When she thought, “My son Gérard is sleeping with a common girl,” it shocked her. She thought, now, seeing him slouch past the doorway, scarcely able to wait for the house to empty so that he could go off and find that girl and spend a disgusting Saturday night with her, “Gérard knows. He looks at his father, and me, and now he knows. Before, he only thought he knew. He knows now why the old man follows me up the stairs.”

She said very lightly, “My son has sex on the brain. It’s all he thinks about now. I suppose all boys are the same. You must have been that way once, Father.” Really, that was farther than she had ever gone. The priest looked like a statue resembling the person he had been a moment before.

O
nce she had departed the house seemed to relax, like an animal that feels safe and can sleep. The old man was to walk
the dog and do something about his children. Those had been his instructions for the day. Oh, yes, and he was to stop thinking about himself. He put on his hat and coat and walked down the street with Don Carlos. Don Carlos dug the wet spring lawns with tortoiseshell nails. Let off the leash, he at once rolled in something horrible. The old man wanted to scold, but the wind made all conversation between himself and the dog impossible. The wind suddenly dropped; it was to the old man like a sudden absence of fear. He could dream as well as Gérard. He invented: he and Don Carlos went through the gap of a fence and were in a large sloping pasture. He trod on wildflowers. From the spongy spring soil grew crab apple trees and choke cherries, and a hedge of something he no longer remembered that, was sweet and white. Presently they – he and the dog – looked down on a village and the two silvery spires of a church. He saw the date over the door: 1885. The hills on the other side of the water were green and black with shadows. He had never seen such a blue and green day. But he was still here, on the street, and had not forgotten it for a second. Imagination was as good as sleepwalking any day.

Léopold stood on the porch, watching him through his camera. He seemed to be walking straight into Léopold’s camera, magically reduced in size.

“Why, Léo,” he said. “You’re not supposed to be here,” not caring to show how happy it made him that Léopold was here. They were bound so soon to lose each other – why start?

“Wouldn’t.”

“Wouldn’t what?”

“Wouldn’t go to Pauline’s. She’s coming back to get us for supper.”

“I don’t want anything more to eat today.”

“Neither do I. And I’m not going.”

Who would dare argue with Léopold? He put his camera down. One day he would have the assurance of a real street, a real father, a real afternoon.

“Well, well,” his father said. “So they’re all gone.” He felt shy. He would never have enough of Léo – he would never know what became of him. He edged past and held the door open for the dog.

“All gone.
Il n’y a que moi.”
Léopold, who never touched anyone, pressed his lips to his father’s hand.

W
hen they woke up in the train, their bed was black with soot and there was soot in his Mum’s blondie hair. They were miles north of Montreal, which had, already, sunk beneath his remembrance. “D’you know what I sor in the night?” said Dennis. He had to keep his back turned while she dressed. They were both in the same berth, to save money. He was small, and didn’t take up much room, but when he woke up in that sooty autumn dawn, he found he was squashed flat against the side of the train. His Mum was afraid of falling out and into the aisle; they had a lower berth, but she didn’t trust the strength of the curtain. Now she was dressing, and sobbing; really sobbing. For this was worse than anything she had ever
been through, she told him. She had been right through the worst of the air raids, yet this was the worst, this waking in the cold, this dark, dirty dawn, everything dirty she touched, her clothes – oh, her clothes! – and now having to dress as she lay flat on her back. She daren’t sit up. She might knock her head.

“You know what I sor?” said the child patiently. “Well, the train must of stopped, see, and some little men with bundles on their backs got on. Other men was holding lanterns. They were all little. They were all talking French.”

“Shut up,” said Mum. “Do you hear me?”

“Sor them,” said the boy.

“You and your bloody elves.”

“They was people.”

“Little men with bundles,” said Mum, trying to dress again. “You start your fairy tales with your Dad and I don’t know what
he’ll
give you.”

It was this mythical, towering, half-remembered figure they were now travelling to join up north.

Roy McLaughlin, travelling on the same train, saw the pair, presently, out of his small red-lidded eyes. Den and his Mum were dressed and as clean as they could make themselves, and sitting at the end of the car. McLaughlin was the last person to get up, and he climbed down from his solitary green-curtained cubicle conspicuous and alone. He had to pad the length of the car in a trench coat and city shoes – he had never owned slippers, bathrobe, or pajamas – past the passengers, who were drawn with fatigue, pale under the lights. They were men, mostly; some soldiers. The Second World War had been finished, in Europe, a year and five months. It was a dirty, rickety train going up to Abitibi. McLaughlin was returning to a construction camp after three weeks in Montreal. He saw the girl,
riding with her back to the engine, doing her nails, and his faculties absently registered “Limey bride” as he went by. The kid, looking out the window, turned and stared. McLaughlin thought “Pest,” but only because children and other men’s wives made him nervous and sour when they were brought around camp on a job.

After McLaughlin had dressed and had swallowed a drink in the washroom – for he was sick and trembling after his holiday – he came and sat down opposite the blond girl. He did not bother to explain that he had to sit somewhere while his berth was being dismantled. His arms were covered with coarse red hair; he had rolled up the sleeves of his khaki shirt. He spread his pale, heavy hands on his knees. The child stood between them, fingertips on the sooty window sill, looking out at the breaking day. Once, the train stopped for a long time; the engine was being changed, McLaughlin said. They had been rolling north but were now turning west. At six o’clock, in about an hour, Dennis and his mother would have to get down, and onto another train, and go north once more. Dennis could not see any station where they were now. There was a swamp with bristling black rushes, red as ink. It was the autumn sunrise; cold, red. It was so strange to him, so singular, that he could not have said an hour later which feature of the scene was in the foreground or to the left or right. Two women wearing army battle jackets over their dresses, with their hair piled up in front, like his mother’s, called and giggled to someone they had put on the train. They were fat and dark – grinny. His mother looked at them with detestation, recognizing what they were; for she hated whores. She had always acted on the desire of the moment, without thought of gain, and she had taken the consequences (Dennis) without complaint.
Dennis saw that she was hating the women, and so he looked elsewhere. On a wooden fence sat four or five men in open shirts and patched trousers. They had dull, dark hair, and let their mouths sag as though they were too tired or too sleepy to keep them closed. Something about them was displeasing to the child, and he thought that this was an ugly place with ugly people. It was also a dirty place; every time Dennis put his hands on the window sill they came off black.