Mavis Gallant - Varieties of Exile

“I’m the general, you can be Grischa, the rest of you are soldiers.” That was Lily, marshaling her troops of little girls on the soggy spring lawn. There had been a freeze, then a thaw, then a new fall of spring snow. The game was a mixture of hide-and-seek and tag, with two teams drawn up, as in red rover or run sheep run. Anyone on the wrong side, the army that wasn’t Lily’s, could be shot on sight. “Grischa” was leader of a team, the equivalent of being a general. The victims lay down and got their coats wet.

Leo had been sweeping the front walk. Now he stood leaning on his broom, eating jujubes out of a paper bag. There was only one other boy, Vince Whitton, aged six. His sister, Beryl, wasn’t allowed to play in the street unless she agreed to take him with her.

Vince said, “One other time, I was over here and some person gave us some jujubes,” but Leo never made a move.

My aunt had sent me across the river after school to find out if Leo was ever going to work for the grocer again; it would be her last show of interest in the Quales. I stood, neither claimed nor discarded, doing nothing in particular, watching Lily in her red coat.

Just then Mr. Quale came along the street and up the walk Leo had cleared of snow. He wore a wool cap and a long gray scarf. He said to Leo, “How do you stand all that jabbering?” meaning the little girls, excited and shrill.

Nothing is so numbing as an unexpected audience. The soldiers started to pick lumps of snow from each other’s coats. Mr. Quale nodded his head, as if it were on a wire spring, and took his cold pipe out of his pocket. He pointed the stem at the girls, then at us, and said, “And bear this in mind, lads. You can’t ever do a bloody thing with them.”

Now Mrs. Quale appeared on the doorstep. She held up a white stocking so we could see the hole in it, and called, “I’ll thrash you, Lily Quale — I swear to God!”

Vince Whitton started to wail: “Beryl, I want to go home.”

“Go home, then.”

“Not without you.”

“Glory, wouldn’t I be glad to see the last of you,” his sis-ter said.

When the war came Leo waited to be the right age; then he enlisted and left Châtelroux. His mother baked coconut biscuits and marble cake, which she posted to him in a tin box. He brought the box back empty when he came on leave. They talked about different things to eat. She had an old, stained, illustrated cookbook they looked at together, and Leo would pick out what he wanted for supper. No more of every-body eating something different: the others had to settle for Leo’s choice.

Lily and I commuted to high schools in Montreal. We took the same train in the morning but did not sit together. Girls sat with girls, boys with boys. Sometimes in the afternoon we saw each other in Windsor Station. The Quales had moved to a two-story, semi-detached house made of orange brick. A steep, narrow staircase rose out of the living room. It was the first thing you saw when you came in. Mrs. Quale waxed the steps and kept them very clean, and never missed a chance to say “upstairs.” There was a bathroom and an indoor toilet. They were buying the house inch by inch.

Leo’s room contained a large bed with a candlewick spread and a varnished desk, in case he had something to write. The desk and the counterpane were the first things Mrs. Quale ever had delivered from Eaton’s. No sooner were they moved upstairs than he went away, leaving behind his civilian life and his life altogether. On that wartime Saturday when I sat doing homework with Lily, Leo had got to Halifax with his regiment and was waiting to embark. His bed was always made up, Lily told me. Mrs. Quale, who now loved Leo best, had heard about embarkation leaves that occurred twice, sons and husbands who came back after having said good-bye. She thought she might see Leo, late at night, under the light in the porch, carrying his kit. Some women dreaded any hitch in the slow process of separation. It was impossible to speak the same brave words twice. Some said they would as soon face a ghost as a man seen off back a few days later but somehow different in look and manner, already remote.

When Mrs. Quale would let us, we used Leo’s desk. In the kitchen our books got stained, because Mrs. Quale kept wiping the table oilcloth with a soapy rag, part of an old undershirt of Leo’s. Upstairs we were obliged to sit at opposite ends of the desk, so our knees wouldn’t touch. Mrs. Quale would look in, bringing us something to eat or drink, or just making sure we hadn’t stirred from our chairs. Once, I remember, she said, “Who’s winning?” as though “education” were another of Lily’s games, one for which Leo had never found the knack.

Lily tried again: “How about letting us work in Leo’s room?”

“You heard me. Not unless I’m in the house.”

“You are in the house.”

Mrs. Quale replied that we were to keep away from the stairs altogether. She was here, yes, but not for long. She sounded as if she had finally decided to quit her home and family, but she was just taking an embroidered tray runner over to Mrs. Bagshaw’s, because of next day’s Sodality sale. The sale was for the benefit of Catholic missions: my father’s rivals.

“Steve,” she said, “either you go home right away or you promise you’ll stay where you are, by the window, where the neighbors can see you.”

In their new kitchen hung a mirror with a frame of grained pitch pine — just for decoration. No one had to wash or shave in the kitchen sink. Mrs. Quale pinned a blue feather to her hat, then stared at it.

“Keep the feather on, Mum,” said Lily. “It looks lovely.” But Mrs. Quale could not decide.

Five minutes after her mother had gone out the front door, Lily said, “It would be better upstairs. We can’t even spread our things out here — there’s so much stuff on the table, ketchup and mustard and that. And I hate the noise of that kitchen clock. It’s like a hammer.”

“She said to stay near the window.”

“Dad stops work at noon Saturdays, but he never gets in before five. Mum will be having tea with the other ladies.”

“She might want to come back, just to see where you are,” I said. “She may change her mind about wearing the feather.”

“No, not now. She’d have done it right away.” The clock was a china plate with a pattern of windmills. The arms of the tallest windmill told the time. She looked up; we both did. “Don’t bother to bring all your books,” she said. “Just what you’ll be needing.”

Upstairs we started one thing, then another. There wasn’t much to it; we never got beyond high fever. I wanted to pull down the blind, but Lily said it would draw the neighbors’ attention. She folded the bedspread — her mother’s pride. She must have made a mistake about the family timetable, for we suddenly heard Mr. Quale at the front door. We were on our feet and presentable by the time he reached the kitchen and dropped something — a newspaper, probably — on the table. He got a bottle out of the icebox and poured himself a beer, capped the bottle, put it back. There was a moment of silence: he may have picked up the blue feather lying on the drainboard, wondering what it was doing there. Or he may have noticed the books we’d left behind, or heard us moving around, talking in whispers. He plodded to the foot of the stairs and called, “Who’s home?”

Lily pulled the coverlet over the sheets and smoothed it. We started down the staircase and met him, almost at the top.

“Want me to get your tea, Dad?” she said.

“I’m all right.” He did not acknowledge me.

Lily collected the rest of my books from the kitchen. I held them flat on my chest, like a shield. She came with me along the river road, up the wooden steps to the bridge, and about halfway across. The Montreal train rushed by and the whole bridge shook; we had to stop and hold on to the railing. As the noise faded, in a thinning mist of steam and soot, she said, “Leo’s gone for good. I’ve said good-bye to him. I know it. Dad’s already starting to say I’m all they’ve got, and Leo isn’t even overseas. I’m not all they’ve got. They’ve got their new house.”