Mavis Gallant - Montreal Stories

“I know there’s a shortage of men,” Mrs. Ireland would suddenly burst out.

“Oh umptee tum titty,” sang Bertie Knox.

“And that after this war it will be still worse.…”

“Ti umpty dum diddy.”

“There’ll hardly be a man left in the world worth his salt.…”

“Tee umpty tum tumpty.”

“But what I do not see …”

“Tee diddle dee dum.”

“Is why a totally unqualified girl …”

“Tum tittle umpty tumpty.”

“Should be subsidized by the taxpayers of this country …”

“Pum pum tee umpty pumpee.”

“Just because her father failed to paint …”

“Oh umpty tumpty tumpty.”

“A mural down in …”

“Tee umpty dum dum.”

“Sorel.”

“Tum tum, oh, dum dum, oh, pum pum, oh, oh, uuuum.”

“Subsidized” stung, for I worked hard. Having no training I had no shortcuts. There were few mechanical shortcuts of any kind. The engineers used slide rules, and the machines might baffle today because of their simplicity. As for a computer, I would not have guessed what it might do or even look like. Facts were recorded on paper and stored in files and summarized by doing sums and displayed in some orderly fashion on graphs. I sat with one elbow on my desk, my left hand concealed in my hair. No one could see that I was counting on my fingers, in units of five and ten. The system by twelves would have finished me; luckily no one mentioned it. Numbers were a sunken world; they were a seascape from which perfect continents might emerge at any minute. I never saw more than their outline. I was caught on Zero. If zero meant Zero, how could you begin a graph on nothing? How could anything under zero be anything but Zero too? I spoke to Mr. Tracy: What occupied the space between Zero and One? It must be something arbitrary, not in the natural order of numbers. If One was solid ground, why not begin with One? Before One there was what? Thin air? Thin air must be Something. He said kindly, “Don’t worry your head,” and if I had continued would certainly have added, “Take the day off.” Chief Engineer McCreery often had to remind me, “But we’re not paying you to think!” If that was so, were we all being paid not to think? At the next place I worked things were even worse. It was another government agency, called Dominion Film Center — my first brush with the creative life. Here one was handed a folded thought like a shapeless school uniform and told, “There, wear that.” Everyone had it on, regardless of fit. It was one step on: “We’re not paying you to think about whatever you are thinking.” I often considered approaching Mrs. Ireland, but she would not accept even a candy from me, let alone a question. “There’s a war on” had been her discouraging refusal of a Life Saver once.

The men by now had found out about her husband. He had left school at Junior Fourth (Grade Seven) and “done nothing to improve himself.” He was a Pole. She was ashamed of having a name that ended in “ski” and used her maiden name; Bertie Knox hadn’t been far off. Thinking of it now, I realize she might not have been ashamed but only aware that the “ski” name on her application could have relegated it to a bottom drawer. Where did the men get their information, I wonder. Old “ski” was a lush who drank her paycheck and sometimes beat her up; the scarves she wound around her neck were meant to cover bruises.

That she was unhappily married I think did not surprise me. What impressed me was that so many of the men were too. I had become engaged to be married, for the third time. There was a slight overlapping of two, by which I mean that the one in Halifax did not know I was also going to marry the one from the West. To the men, who could not follow my life as closely as they’d have wanted — I gave out next to nothing — it seemed like a long betrothal to some puppy in uniform, whom they had never seen, and whose Christian name kept changing. One of my reasons for discretion was that I was still underage. Until now I had been using my minority as an escape hatch, the way a married man will use his wife — for “Ursula will never divorce” I substituted “My mother will never consent.” Once I had made up my mind I simply began looking for roads around the obstacle; it was this search, in fact, that made me realize I must be serious. No one, no one at all, knew what I was up to, or what my entirely apocryphal emancipation would consist of; all that the men knew was that this time it did look as if I was going through with it. They took me aside, one after the other, and said, “Don’t do it, Linnet. Don’t do it.” Bertie Knox said, “Once you’re in it, you’re in it, kiddo.” I can’t remember any man ever criticizing his own wife — it is something men don’t often do, anywhere — but the warning I had was this: Marriage was a watershed that transformed sweet, cheerful, affectionate girls into, well, their own mothers. Once a girl had caught (their word) a husband she became a whiner, a snooper, a killjoy, a wet blanket, a grouch, and a bully. What I gleaned out of this was that it seemed hard on the men. But then even Mrs. Ireland, who never said a word to me, declared, “I think it’s terrible.” She said it was insane for me to marry someone on his way overseas, to tie up my youth, to live like a widow without a widow’s moral status. Why were she and I standing together, side by side, looking out the window at a gray sky, at pigeons, at a streetcar grinding up the steep street? We could never possibly have stood close, talking in low voices. And yet there she is; there I am with Mrs. Ireland. For once she kept her voice down. She looked out — not at me. She said the worst thing of all. Remembering it, I see the unwashed windowpane. She said, “Don’t you girls ever know when you’re well off? Now you’ve got no one to lie to you, to belittle you, to make a fool of you, to stab you in the back.” But we were different — different ages, different women, two lines of a graph that could never cross.

Mostly when people say “I know exactly how I felt” it can’t be true, but here I am sure — sure of Mrs. Ireland and the window and of what she said. The recollection has something to do with the blackest kind of terror, as stunning as the bolts of happiness that strike for no reason. This blackness, this darkening, was not wholly Mrs. Ireland, no; I think it had to do with the men, with squares and walls and limits and numbers. How do you stand if you stand upon Zero? What will the passage be like between Zero and One? And what will happen at One? Yes, what will happen?

IN THE THIRD summer of the war I began to meet refugees. There were large numbers of them in Montreal — to me a source of infinite wonder. I could not get enough of them. They came straight out of the twilit Socialist-literary landscape of my reading and my desires. I saw them as prophets of a promised social order that was to consist of justice, equality, art, personal relations, courage, generosity. Each of them — Belgian, French, Catholic German, Socialist German, Jewish German, Czech — was a book I tried to read from start to finish. My dictionaries were films, poems, novels, Lenin, Freud. That the refugees tended to hate one another seemed no more than a deplorable accident. Nationalist pigheadedness, that chronic, wasting, and apparently incurable disease, was known to me only on Canadian terms and I did not always recognize its symptoms. Anything I could not decipher I turned into fiction, which was my way of untangling knots. At the office where I worked I now spent my lunch hour writing stories about people in exile. I tried to see Montreal as an Austrian might see it and to feel whatever he felt. I was entirely at home with foreigners, which is not surprising — the home was all in my head. They were the only people I had met until now who believed, as I did, that our victory would prove to be a tidal wave nothing could stop. What I did not know was how many of them hoped and expected their neighbors to be washed away too.