Mavis Gallant - Home Truths

Thumb-sucker Mildred did not remember having screamed, or anything at all except the trip from Montreal by train. “Boy, is your grandmother ever a rich old lady!” said the maid from Waterloo. “If she wasn’t, where’d you be? In an orphung asylum. She’s a Christian, I can tell you.” But another day, when she was angry with the grandmother over something, she said, “She’s a damned old sow. It’s in the mattress and she’s lying on it. You can hear the bills crackle when you turn the mattress Saturdays. I hope they find it when she dies, is all I can say.”

The girls saw their grandmother dead, in the bed, on that mattress. The person crying hardest in the room was the maid. She had suddenly dyed her hair dark red, and the girls did not know her, because of her tears, and her new clothes, and because of the way she fondled and kissed them. “We’ll never see each other again,” said the maid.

Now that their grandmother had died, the girls went to live with their mother’s brother and his wife and their many children. It was a suburb of Montreal called Ahuntsic. They did not see anything that reminded them of Montreal, and did not recall their mother. There was a parlor here full of cut glass, which was daily rubbed and polished, and two television sets, one for the use of the children. The girls slept on a pull-out divan and wrangled about bedclothes. Cathie wanted them pushed down between them in a sort of trough, because she felt a draft, but Mildred complained that the blankets thus arranged were tugged away from her side. She was not properly covered and afraid of falling on the floor. One of their relations (they had any number here on their mother’s side) made them a present of a box of chocolate almonds, but the cousins they lived with bought exactly the same box, so as to tease them. When Cathie and Mildred rushed to see if their own box was still where they had hidden it, they were bitterly mocked. Their Ontario grandmother’s will was not probated and every scrap of food they put in their mouths was taken from the mouths of cousins: so they were told. Their cousins made them afraid of ghosts. They put out the lights and said, “Look out, she is coming to get you, all in black,” and when Mildred began to whimper, Cathie said, “Our mother wouldn’t try to frighten us.” She had not spoken of her until now. One of the cousins said, “I’m talking about your old grandmother. Your mother isn’t dead.” They were shown their father’s grave, and made to kneel and pray. Their lives were in the dark now, in the dark of ghosts, whose transparent shadows stood round their bed; soon they lived in the black of nuns. Language was black, until they forgot their English. Until they spoke French, nothing but French, the family pretended not to understand them, and stared as if they were peering in the dark. They very soon forgot their English.

They could not stay here with these cousins forever, for the flat was too small. When they were eight and twelve, their grandmother’s will was probated and they were sent to school. For the first time in their lives, now, the girls did not sleep in the same bed. Mildred slept in a dormitory with the little girls, where a green light burned overhead, and a nun rustled and prayed or read beside a green lamp all night long. Mildred was bathed once every fortnight, wearing a rubber apron so that she would not see her own body. Like the other little girls, she dressed, in the morning, sitting on the floor, so that they would not see one another. Her thumb, sucked white, was taped to the palm of her hand. She caught glimpses of Cathie sometimes during recreation periods, but Cathie was one of the big girls, and important. She did not play, as the little ones still did, but walked up and down with the supervisor, walking backwards as the nun walked forward.

One day, looking out of a dormitory window, Mildred saw a rooftop and an open skylight. She said to a girl standing nearby, “That’s our house.” “What house?” “Where Mummy lives.” She said that sentence, three words, in English. She had not thought or spoken “Mummy” since she was six and a half. It turned out that she was lying about the house. Lying was serious; she was made to promenade through the classrooms carrying a large pair of shears and the sign “I am a liar.” She did not know the significance of the shears, nor, it seemed, did the nun who organized the punishment. It had always been associated with lying, and (the nun suddenly remembered) had to do with cutting out the liar’s tongue. The tattling girl, who had told about “Where Mummy lives,” was punished too, and made to carry a wastebasket from room to room with “I am a basket-carrier” hung round her neck. This meant a tale-bearer. Everyone was in the wrong.

Cathie was not obliged to wear a rubber apron in her bath, but a muslin shift. She learned the big girls’ trick, which was to take it off and dip it in water, and then bathe properly. When Mildred came round carrying her scissors and her sign Cathie had had her twice-monthly bath and felt damp and new. She said to someone, “That’s my sister,” but “sister” was a dark scowling little thing. “Sister” got into still more trouble: a nun, a stray from Belgium, perhaps as one refugee to another, said to Mildred, swiftly drawing her into a broom-cupboard, “Call me Maman.” “Maman” said the child, to whom “Mummy” had meaning until the day of the scissors. Who was there to hear what was said in the broom-cupboard? What basket-carrier repeated that? It was forbidden for nuns to have favorites, forbidden to have pet names for nuns, and the Belgian stray was sent to the damp wet room behind the chapel and given flower-arranging to attend to. There Mildred found her, by chance, and the nun said, “Get away, haven’t you made enough trouble for me?”

Cathie was told to pray for Mildred, the trouble-maker, but forgot. The omission weighed on her. She prayed for her mother, grandmother, father, herself (with a glimpse in the prayer of her own future coffin, white) and the uncles and aunts and cousins she knew and those she had never met. Her worry about forgetting Mildred in her prayers caused her to invent a formula: “Everyone I have ever known who is dead or alive, anyone I know now who is alive but might die, and anyone I shall ever know in the future.” She prayed for her best friend, who wanted like Cathie to become a teacher, and for a nun with a mustache who was jolly, and for her confessor, who liked to hear her playing the Radetzky March on the piano. Her hair grew lighter and was brushed and combed by her best friend.

Mildred was suddenly taken out of school and adopted. Their mother’s sister, one of the aunts they had seldom seen, had lost a daughter by drowning. She said she would treat Mildred as she did her own small son, and Mildred, who wished to leave the convent school, but did not know if she cared to go and live in a place called Chicoutimi, did not decide. She made them decide, and made them take her away. When the girls were fifteen and nineteen, and Mildred was called Desaulniers and not Collier, the sisters were made to meet. Cathie had left school and was studying nursing, but she came back to the convent when she had time off, not because she did not have anywhere else to go, but because she did not want to go to any other place. The nuns had said of Cathie, laughing, “She doesn’t want to leave — we shall have to push her out.” When Cathie’s sister, Mildred Desaulniers, came to call on her, the girls did not know what to say. Mildred wore a round straw hat with a clump of plastic cherries hanging over the brim; her adoptive brother, in long trousers and bow tie, did not get out of the car. He was seven, and had slick wet-looking hair, as if he had been swimming. “Kiss your sister,” said Mildred’s mother, to Cathie, admonishingly. Cathie did as she was told, and Mildred immediately got back in the car with her brother and snatched a comic book out of his hands. “Look, Mildred,” said her father, and let the car slow down on a particular street. The parents craned at a garage, and at dirty-legged children with torn sneakers on their feet. Mildred glanced up and then back at her book. She had no reason to believe she had seen it before, or would ever again.