Mavis Gallant - Varieties of Exile

That was how adults saw things then: simply. Catholic-Protestant stories, all bad luck, lay strewn around us, the rocks and bricks of separation. Why let anything go too far between two kids who were bound to separate? The town we lived in straggled along both sides of the Châtelroux River. There was no core to the place except a huddle of stores around the French church, with its aluminum-painted roof and spire. The Quales were in bungalow territory, Catholic and English-speaking — everyone’s minority. The last thing they looked for was trouble. My aunt had a house on the opposite shore, facing the river. We had a dock and a rowboat and a canoe. We had French-Canadian neighbors, working a strip farm, and English-Canadian acquaintances living in houses like ours, farther down the road, toward the bridge and railway station. We had a wide lawn and an enclosed backyard, and a low hedge of shrubs with red berries, and a covered gallery running around three sides of the house. We did not keep a cat, because my aunt thought cats were hypocrites, and we gave up keeping a dog after Snowy drowned and Rex was poisoned. My parents were Anglican missionaries in China; my Aunt Elspeth was bringing me up.

I knew even then that Mrs. Quale was mistaken about Lily. She could never have wanted a close girlfriend. The Polish chum was just a handbook she studied for expertise. Lily kept a large pond stocked with social possibilities, nearly all boys, and thought nothing of calling me on a Saturday if some other happy chance had let her down. My aunt, hearing my end of the negotiation, would dub me a human jellyfish; but one of the things adults forget is how complete younger people seem to one another, how individual and clearly defined. It is the grown person who looks evasive and blurry, who needs to improvise. Lily to me was without shadow: I took it for granted she worked her arrangements with hook and reel. My easygoing response was more toughly snobbish, and so more injurious to Lily, than my aunt could guess. Probably, I thought well of myself for letting Leo Quale’s little sister get away with murder.

Before that time, when I was still in seventh grade — in those days known as Junior Fourth — my aunt remarked that it would be good for someone like me, raised by a woman, to have a stalwart figure of some kind to look up to. I thought about Lily, and the scale of her nerve, and how she learned the uses of gall from watching her brother Leo, and I said, “You mean like Leo Quale?”

“Leo has certain qualities,” said my aunt, as if he had barely escaped hanging. “It was more a gentleman I had in mind — say, like Mr. Coleman.”

She was defining a stage of growth as well as a caste. It is true that at fifteen Leo was too advanced to make a friend of me, but he was still too immature to offer paternal advice about sexual prudence and financial restraint. (My aunt actually believed fathers can do this.) She began to think well of him later that year, after running out of other models for me. To my aunt the male nature was expected to combine the qualities of an Anglo-Canadian bank manager and a British war poet, which means to say a dead one. Folded inside the masculine psyche there had to be a bright yearning to suffocate face down in a flooded trench, to bleed from wounds inflicted by England’s enemies, even to be done in by a septic flea bite, if a patriotic case could be made against the flea.

Leo showed that eagerness to perish: enlist, ship overseas, never be heard from again. He was heavy and blond, a kind of Viking, one of the thick ones, out of dark small parents, Glasgow Irish on both sides. It had taken him six years to flounder through his last three grades, and he was now becalmed in eighth. He could read, he could even work complicated sums in his head, but he could not write a complete sentence. My aunt blamed his school, which also happened to be mine: Leo should have had Catholic teachers. All these years he had felt bewildered, unwanted, could not focus his intelligence. A memory of Leo — placid, sleepy, too big for his desk — stands next to my aunt’s appraisal.

After school and all day Saturday he delivered groceries to English customers, on both sides of the river. Sometimes he made four or five trips along the same street — particularly Fridays, when there was a rush on beer. Quebec was the only part of Canada where beer could be sold by a grocer, instead of in a government liquor store. We owed the privilege to the twists and snarls of Catholic morality, said my aunt, who drank only sherry.

Leo and my aunt were expecting a war, well ahead of world leaders. “Ah, it’ll come, all right,” he would assure her, lowering a box of provisions from his shoulder to the kitchen table. “And we’ll be in it. Don’t you worry, Mrs. Cope. We need a good old war to sort us out.”

“I’m afraid you’re right, Leo. War brings out the best in men and nations, but we have to remember the fallen and the missing, and sometimes there is injustice, too.”

“It’s them or us,” said Leo. “England forever!” He sounded a bit crazy. He couldn’t have heard it at home: his father hated the English.

What did my aunt mean by “missing,” I used to wonder. How did you know you were missed: I had never missed my parents, and their letters showed no longing to see me but simply told me to be good. People in Châtelroux, when they talked about the last war or the next, said, “You’ve got to die sometime.” In St. George’s Anglican Church my aunt and I droned in unison that we believed in the resurrection of the body, though common evidence spoke against such a thing. Leo may have seen a brief future in the Army as an improvement over the immediate prospect, stuck in a classroom where he was a head taller than his teacher. Perhaps he was just exercising his native talent for saying whatever might appeal. He once boasted to my aunt that, at thirteen, he had tried to join the Mac-Paps — the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion, the Canadians fighting Franco. It was no more preposterous than his father’s claim to have played rugby for Ireland: Mr. Quale was built like a jockey and had never been outside Quebec.

You expected people like the Quales to be undersized. They descended from immigrants known to other British incomers as “Glasgow runts.” The term has vanished: it takes only two generations, no time in real time, to acquire strong teeth and large hands and feet and a long backbone. Only aversions and fears, the stuff of racial memory, are handed down intact.

To recall the Quales around their supper table, with the radio turned right up, three or four saucepans bubbling on the stove, everyone eating something different, Mr. Quale yelling back at the radio during the news broadcast, laying down the law on England, or Quebec politics, or the Spanish Loyalists (“Every last man a louse” did for them all) is to see in deep perspective the Gorbals of Glasgow, where their parents had started out, and farther away, thin on the horizon, the trampling of Ireland. Mr. and Mrs. Quale belong to the first race of Irish, black-haired, driven underground, their great gods shrunk to leprechauns. Leo is the Norse marauder, hopelessly astray in the dark. Lily seems delicate, at least to the eye, with pale fine hair: a recent prototype, if you count in centuries.

Weekdays Mr. Quale got up at five and took the train to Montreal, where he was a plainclothes officer on the police force. He did not know French but could cause the arrest of people who did not understand English. Usually he came back in the middle of the afternoon and sat on a bench outside the railway station reading the Montreal Star until about five, the Quales’ suppertime. Their neighbors said Old Lady Quale gave him no peace to read the crime news at home. She thought a husband was supposed to keep moving, emptying the water pan under the icebox, examining for short circuits the loops of wiring that hung in fronds all over the house.