Mavis Gallant: Montreal Stories

What did he mean? A trained nanny was supposed to be on her way over from England. Nora was filling in, as a favor; that was all. He behaved as if they had known each other for years, had even suggested she call him “Boyd.” (She had pretended not to hear.) His buoyant nature seemed to require a sort of fake complicity or comradeship from women, on short notice. It was his need, not Nora’s, and in her mind she became all-denying. She was helping out because her father, who knew Mr. Fenton, had asked if she would, but nothing more. Mr. Fenton was in his late twenties, a married man, a father, some sort of Protestant — another race.

Luckily, neither the girl in uniform nor the attendant nun seemed to know English. They might otherwise have supposed Nora to be Neil’s mother. She could not have been the mother of anyone. She had never let a man anywhere near. If ever she did, if ever she felt ready, he would be nothing like Mr. Fenton — typical Anglo-Montreal gladhander, the kind who said “Great to see you!” and a minute later forgot you were alive. She still had no image of an acceptable lover (which meant husband) but rather of the kind she meant to avoid. For the moment, it took in just about every type and class. What her mother called “having relations” was a source of dirty stories for men and disgrace for girls. It brought bad luck down even on married couples unless, like the Fentons, they happened to be well-off and knew how to avoid accidents and had no religious barrier that kept them from using their knowledge. When a mistake did occur — namely, Neil — they weren’t strapped for cash or extra space. Yet they were helpless in some other way, could not tend to an infant without outside assistance, and for that reason had left Neil to founder among castaways for his first twelve weeks.

So Nora reasoned, gently stroking the baby’s back. She wondered if he had managed to capture her thoughts. Apparently infants came into the world with a gift for mind reading, an instinct that faded once they began to grasp the meaning of words. She had been assured it was true by her late Aunt Rosalie, a mother of four. The time had come to take him out of this sour place, see him fed, washed, put into new clothes and a clean bed. But the two men seemed like guests at a disastrous party, unable to get away, rooted in place by a purely social wish to seem agreeable.

How sappy they both look, ran Nora’s thoughts. As sappy as a couple of tenors. (“Sappy-looking as a tenor” was an expression of her father’s.) I’ll never get married. Who wants to look at some sappy face the whole day.

As though he had heard every silent word and wished to prove he could be lively and attentive, the doctor looked all around the room, for the first time, and remarked, “Some of these children, it would be better for everybody if they died at birth.” His English was exact and almost without accent, but had the singsong cadence of French Montreal. It came out, “Most of these children, it would be better for everybody …” Nora held a low opinion of that particular lilt. She had been raised in two languages. To get Nora to answer in French, particularly after she had started attending an English high school, her mother would pretend not to understand English. I may not be one of your intellectuals, Nora decided (an assurance her father gave freely), but I sound English in English and French in French. She knew it was wrong of her to criticize an educated man such as Dr. Marchand, but he had said a terrible thing. It would have sounded bad spoken heedfully by the King himself. (The King, that August morning, was still George the Sixth.)

The stiff drinks Mr. Fenton had taken earlier in the day must have been wearing off. He seemed far away in his mind and somewhat put-upon. The doctor’s remark brought him to. He said something about shoving off, turned easily to the nun, gave her a great smile. In answer, she placed a folded document in his hands, said a cool “Au revoir” to the doctor and did not look at Nora at all. In the hall outside Mr. Fenton stopped dead. He appealed to the doctor and Nora: “Look at this thing.”

Nora shifted the baby to her right arm but otherwise kept her distance. “It’s a certificate,” she said.

“Baptismal,” said the doctor. “He’s been baptized.”

“I can see that. Only, it’s made out for ‘Armand Albert Antoine.’ She gave me the wrong thing. You’d better tell them,” for of course he could not have made the complaint in French.

“Those are just foundling names,” said the doctor. “They give two or three Christian names when there’s no known family. I’ve seen even four . ‘Albert’ or ‘Antoine’ could be used as a surname. You see?”

“There damn well is a known family,” said Mr. Fenton. “Mine. The name is Neil Boyd Fenton. When I make up my mind, it’s made up for good. I never look back.” But instead of returning the certificate he stuffed it, crumpled, into a pocket. “Nobody asked to have him christened here. I call that overstepping.”

“They have to do it,” said the doctor. “It is a rule.” In the tone of someone trying to mend a quarrel, he went on, “Neil’s a fine name.” Nora knew for a fact he had suggested it. Mr. Fenton had never got round to finding a name, though he’d had three months to think it over. “There’s another name I like. ‘Earl.’ Remember Earl Laine?”

“Yeah, I remember Earl.” They started down a broad staircase, three in a row. Mr. Fenton was red in the face, either from his outburst or just the heat and weight of his dark clothes. Nora might have sympathized, but she had already decided not to do that: What can’t be helped must be borne. Her mother had got her to wear a long-sleeved cotton jacket, over her white piqué dress, and a girdle and stockings, because of the nuns. The dress was short and allowed her knees to be seen. Nora had refused to let the hem down for just that one visit. Her small gold watch was a graduation present from her uncle and cousins. The blue bangle bracelets on her other wrist had belonged to her elder sister.

The mention of Earl Laine had started the men on a lastwar story. She had already noticed their war stories made them laugh. They were not stories, properly speaking, but incidents they remembered by heart and told back and forth. Apparently, this Earl person had entered an Italian farmhouse (“shack” was the word Mr. Fenton actually used) and dragged a mattress off a bed. He wanted it for his tank, to make the tank more comfortable. A woman all in black had followed him out the door, clawing at the mattress, screaming something. When she saw there was no help for it, that Earl was bigger and stronger and laughing the whole time, she lay down in the road and thumped the ground with her fists.

“That Earl!” said the doctor, as one might speak of a bad but charming boy. “He’d do anything. Anything he felt like doing. Another time …”

“He was killed in ’44,” Mr. Fenton said. “Right? So how old would that make him now?”

It sounded very silly to Nora, like a conundrum in arithmetic, but the doctor replied, “He’d be around twenty-three.” Dr. Marchand was older than Mr. Fenton but much younger than her father. He walked in a stately, deliberate way, like a mourner at a funeral. There was a wife-and-children air to him. Unlike Mr. Fenton he wore a wedding ring. Nora wondered if Mrs. Fenton and Mme. Marchand had ever met.

“Earl’s people lived up in Montreal North,” said Mr. Fenton. “I went to see them after I got back. They were Italians. Did you know that? He never said.”

“I knew it the first time he opened his mouth,” said the doctor. “His English wasn’t right. It turned out his first language was some Sicilian dialect from Montreal North. Nobody in Italy could make it out, so he stayed with English. But it sounded funny.”