Mavis Gallant - Home Truths

They crawled into the center of town, in the wake of streetcars. Mrs. Holland, afraid for her charges, drove so slowly that she was a traffic hazard. An irritated policeman waved them by.

“Is the store all right?” Mrs. Holland said to Ruth. “Would you rather go somewhere else?” She had circled the block twice, looking for a parking space.

Ruth, annoyed by all this caution, said, “Don’t ask me. It’s up to the girls. They’re the guests.”

But neither of the girls could choose. Helen was shy, May absorbed. Mrs. Holland found a parking place at last, and they filed into the store.

“I used to come here all the time with my sister,” May said, suddenly coming to as they stood, jammed, in the elevator. “We came for birthdays and for treats. We had our birthdays two days in a row, because we’re twins and otherwise it wouldn’t be fair. We wore the same clothes and hardly anybody could tell us apart. But now,” she said, echoing a parental phrase, “we have different clothes and we go to different schools, because we have to develop separate personalities.”

“Well,” said Mrs. Holland, unable to take this in. “Have you a sister?” she said to Helen.

There was a silence; then Helen blurted out, “We’re seven at home.”

“How nice,” said Mrs. Holland. But Helen knew that people said this just to be polite, and that being seven at home was just about the most shameful thing imaginable.

“Are your sisters at school with you?” Mrs. Holland asked.

Everyone in the elevator was listening. Helen hung her head. She had been sent to school by an uncle who was also her godfather and who had taken his duties seriously. Having promised to renounce Satan and all his works in Helen’s name, he uprooted her, aged six, from her warm, rowdy, half-literate family and packed her off to school. In school, Helen had been told, she would learn to renounce Satan for herself and, more important, learn to be a lady. Some of the teachers still remembered her arriving, mute and frightened, quite as frightened as if the advantages of superior schooling had never been pointed out. There were only three boarders Helen’s age. They were put in the care of an elderly housekeeper, who filled a middle role, neither staff nor servant. After lessons they were sent to sit with her, in her red-papered, motto-spangled room. She taught them hymns; the caterwauling got on her nerves, but at least they sat still while singing. She supervised their rushed baths and murderously washed their hair. Sometimes some of the staff wondered if more should not be done for the little creatures, for although they were clean and good and no trouble, the hand that dressed them was thorough but unaffectionate, and they never lost the wild-eyed hopelessly untidy look of unloved children. Helen now remembered very little of this, nor could she imagine life away from school. Her uncle-godfather conscientiously sent her home each summer, to what seemed to her a common, clamorous, poverty-stricken family. “They’re so loud,” she would confide to the now quite elderly person who had once taught her hymns. “Their voices are so loud. And they drink, and everything.” She had grown up to be a tall, quiet girl, much taller than most girls her own age. In spite of her height she wore her short, ridiculous tunic unselfconsciously. Her dearest wish was to wear this uniform as long as she could, to stay on at the school forever, to melt, with no intervening gap, from the students’ dining hall to the staff sitting room. Change disturbed her; she was hostile to new girls, could scarcely bear it when old girls came back to be married from the school chapel. Hanging over the stairs with the rest of the girls, watching the exit of the wedding party from chapel to street, she would wonder how the bride could bear to go off this way, with a man no one knew, having seen school again, having glimpsed the girls on the stairs. When the headmistress said, in chapel, confusing two esteemed poets, “The old order changeth, girls. The Captains and Kings depart. Our King has gone, and now our beloved Kipling has left us,” Helen burst into tears. She did not wish the picture of George V to leave the walls; she did not want Kipling to be “the late.” For a few days afterward, the girls amused themselves by saying, “Helen, listen. The Captains and Kings depart,” so that they could be rewarded, and slightly horrified, by her astonishing grief. But then they stopped, for her shame and silence after such outbursts were disconcerting. It never became a joke, and so had to be abandoned.

Mrs. Holland and her guests settled into an oval tearoom newly done up with chrome and onyx, stuffed with shoppers, smelling of tea, wet coats, and steam heating. Helen looked covertly at Mrs. Holland, fearing another question. None came. The waitress had handed them each a giant, tasselled menu. “I’ll have whatever the rest of them have,” Helen said, not looking at hers.

“Well,” said Ruth, “I’ll have chocolate ice cream with marshmallow. No, wait. Strawberry with pineapple.”

May forgot her sister. The choice before her was insupportable. “The same as Ruth,” she said, at last, agonized and uncertain.

Mrs. Holland, who loathed sweets, ordered a sundae, as a friendly gesture, unaware that in the eyes of the girls she had erred. Mothers and their substitutes were expected to drink tea and nibble at flabby pâté sandwiches.

As soon as their ice cream was before them, Ruth began again about the chocolate bar. “My father never eats chocolate,” she said, quite suddenly. “And he knew it was mine. He’d never touch anything that wasn’t his. It would be stealing.”

“Maybe it got thrown away,” said May.

“That’d be the same as stealing,” said Ruth.

Mrs. Holland said, “Ruth, I do not know what became of your bit of chocolate.”

Ruth turned to Mrs. Holland her calm brown eyes. “Goodness!” she said. “I never meant to say you took it. Anyway, even if you did make a mistake and eat it up sometime when you were driving around — Well, I mean, who cares? It was only a little piece, half a Cadbury bar in blue paper.”

“I seldom eat chocolate,” said Mrs. Holland. “If I had seen it, let alone eaten it, I should certainly have remembered.”

“Then he must have had somebody else with him,” said Ruth. The matter appeared to be settled. She went on eating, savoring every mouthful.

Mrs. Holland put down her spoon. The trend of this outing, she realized now, could lead only to tears. It was one of the situations in her life — and they were frequent — climaxed by a breakdown. The breakdown would certainly be her own: she wept easily. Ruth, whose character so belied her stormy Latin looks, had rarely wept since babyhood. May, the thin, freckled one, appeared quite strung up about something, but held in by training, by discipline. I lack both, Mrs. Holland thought. As for the big girl, Helen, Mrs. Holland had already dismissed her as cold and stupid. Mrs. Holland said softly, “Les larmes d’un adolescent.” But it doesn’t apply to cold little Canadians, she thought.

“I know what that means,” said Ruth. She licked her spoon on both sides.

Mrs. Holland’s phrase, the image it evoked, came from the outer circle of experience. Disturbed, the girls moved uneasily in their chairs, feeling that nothing more should be said.

“Don’t you girls ever cry?” said Mrs. Holland, almost with hostility.

“Never,” said Ruth, settling that.

“My sister cried,” said May. She turned her light-lashed gaze to Helen and said, “And Helen cries.”

“I don’t,” said Helen. She drew in, physically, with the first apprehension of being baited. “I do not.”

“Oh, Helen, you do,” said May. She turned to Ruth for confirmation, but Ruth, indifferent, having spoken for herself, was scooping up the liquid dregs of her ice cream. “Do you want to see Helen cry?” said May. Like Mrs. Holland, she seemed to have accepted the idea that one of them was going to break down and disgrace them; it might as well be Helen. Or perhaps the remark went deeper than that. Mrs. Holland, who could barely follow Ruth’s mental and emotional spirals, felt unable, and disinclined, to cope with this one. May leaned forward, facing Helen. Mrs. Holland suddenly answered “No,” too late, for May was saying, in a pretty, piping voice, “Hey, Helen, listen. The King has left us, and Kipling is dead.”