Mavis Gallant - Home Truths

The prospects Ramsay had known until this summer were of cities — Montreal, and then Berlin. They were the same to him, whether their ruins were dark and soft, abandoned to pigeons and wavy pieces of sky, or created and destroyed by one process, like the machine that consumes itself. The air he had breathed was filled with particles of brick dust. He accepted faces, not one of which he would put a name to, and knew the smell and touch of wet raincoats worn by people he would never meet. In the streets of one place, Berlin, he walked on the dead, but both cities were built over annihilated walls scarcely anyone could remember. He knew that a lake is a lake — that is, a place to swim — and that parks and trees are good for children, but he had never known the name of a leaf or a tree until Moser’s widow began telling him, comparing one wild grass with another, picking a flower, showing its picture in a book. In the morning, standing beside him in the ravine on the far side of the house, she pointed to fields of white anemones that seemed covered with frost, and she gathered forget-me-nots, wild geranium, mauve and violet and pink, and valerian like lace, and mare’s-tails with fronds of green string. “The first plant life on earth,” said Katharine, bending down. For a reason he could not immediately interpret, the words, and the sight of the plant in Katharine’s hand, rushed him back to his mother screaming, and the wartime photograph of his father, which, of course, was mute.

Wishing for life without its past, for immeasurable distance from the first life on earth, he groped to Sabine and Berlin instead of Katharine and now. In the short daydream, Sabine frowned and turned her head sharply, then felt among the clothes on the floor for a cigarette. She told Ramsay she had had one abortion and would probably never marry. Later, she said she would travel and try a different husband in every country. She was not the doting German girl his father’s crowd talked about in their anecdotes of the war. Her flat was shut up tight except when the janitor’s wife came to clean and flung the windows wide. The janitor’s wife was not concerned about Ramsay (who had not spent an entire night with a girl before) or Sabine dressed in two towels. “I saw a wild beast in the courtyard with black eyes, like an Italian,” she said, scrubbing the sink. This was the only house on the street older than Ramsay, and the courtyard was full of rats and secrets. When it rained the courtyard smelled of ashes. Laughing about the janitor’s wife and the Italian rat, Sabine stood naked before her mirror and said, “Look at how brown I am.” One of her admirers had given her a sunlamp.

The first plant life on earth was spongy and weak; and the sun, in and out of clouds, sucked up every trace of color from Katharine Moser’s hair and hand and eyes. He had seen color paler than Katharine’s hand on angles of brick — was it paint splashed? Car lights washing by? There were no fissures in the brick, no space for fronds and stems, no room for leftovers. Why is brick ugly? Who says it is? Ramsay’s father knows how much gravel per cubic centimeter is needed for several different sorts of concrete; he wrote his thesis on this twenty years ago, when he came back from the war.

“In Berlin,” Ramsay started to say — something about bright weeds growing — but Katharine saw a magpie. “This is their season,” she said. “They prey on fledglings.” She told of the shrike, the jay, but he was thinking about the black, red-brown, smoke-marked courtyard in Berlin, and Sabine, shivering because she was suddenly cold, tender when it was too late, when there was no need for tenderness, asking what she considered serious questions in her version of English: “Was that all? Worth it? All that important?” She was not looking into space but at a clock she could not bother winding that was stopped forever at six minutes to three.

He and Katharine walked back to the lawn and the breakfast table, and she tipped her head like Sabine’s, though not in remembrance of pleasure, only because the sun was strong again. She spoke to the cook’s little boy, in straw hat and red shorts, pretending to garden; he was at their feet. Then behind and above them a branch rocked. It was Katharine’s cat attacking a nest. The fury of the baffle could be measured by the leaves rustling and thrashing in the windless day. A cat face the size of the moon must be over the nest; the eyes and the paws — there was no help for it — came through sunny leaves. The sky was behind the head. “Stop him, stop him!” Ramsay screamed like a girl or like a child.

“Pip! Naughty Pip!” She clapped her hands. “He’s got one, I’m afraid.” She was not disturbed. Neither was the cook’s little boy, though he sucked his lip and stared up at the tree a moment more. “It is the cat’s nature,” she said. “Some things die — look at the spruce.” (To encourage him.) “We think it is dying, but those fresh bits are new.” The trees were devoured by something he did not understand — a web, a tent of gray, a hideous veil. The shadows netted on the breakfast table, on cups and milk and crumpled napkins, seemed a web to catch anything — lovers, stretched fingers, claws. He tried to see through Katharine’s eyes: the cat had its nature, and every living thing carried a name.

“Do you notice that scent, Douglas? Does it bother you? It is the acacia flowering down the valley. Some people mind it. It gives them headaches. Poor Moser,” she said, of her late husband, the conductor, who had died at Christmas and would have been seventy-four this summer. “When he began having headaches he thought all trees were poisonous. He breathed through a scarf. That was the form his fears took.”

“It’s only natural to be scared if you’re dying,” said Ramsay. He supposed this; until this moment he had not given it a thought.

“Old people are afraid,” she said, as if she and Douglas were alike, without a time gap. (He had reckoned the difference in their ages to be twenty-five years.) “Although we’ll know one day,” she said, as if they would arrive at old age together. Lowering her voice, in case her adolescent daughter was spying and listening, she told how Moser had made her stop smoking. He did not want her to make a widower of him. He had chosen to marry Katharine because she was young, and he wished to be outlived. He was afraid of being alone. She, a mere child then, a little American girl nearly thirty but simple for her age, untalented, could not even play the piano, had been chosen by the great old man. But he forgot about being alone in eternity. “I told him,” she said, putting the wild flowers in a glass of water on the breakfast table. “Unless two people die at exactly the same moment, they can never meet again.” With such considerations had she entertained the ill old man. He had clasped her hands, weeping. His headache marched from the roots of his hair to his eyebrows, down the temples, around the eyes.

Ramsay was careful how he picked his way through this. For all his early dash and promise he was as Canadian as his father, which is to say cautious and single-minded. He had a mother younger than Katharine, who began all her conversations on a deep and intimate level, as if coming up for air was a waste of time. That made him more prudent still. He said, “Those the acacias?”

“The plum trees? They can’t be what you mean, surely. That’s the cuckoo you’re hearing, by the way. If you count the calls, you can tell how many years before you get married. Peggy and Anne count the whole day.” He considered the lunatic cuckoo, but having before him infinite time, he let the count trail off. The cook’s small boy, squatting over one mauled, exhausted, eternally transplanted geranium, heard Ramsay and Katharine, but they might have been cuckoos too for all he cared. The only English words he knew were “What’s that for?” “Shut up,” and “Idiot.” This child, who was a pet of Katharine’s, lunched with the family. Until Ramsay had come, a few days ago, the boy had been the only man in the house. He sat on a cushion, an atlas, and a history of nineteenth-century painting, so as to reach the table, and he bullied and had his way; he had been obeyed and cherished by Katharine Moser and her daughter Anne; by fat Peggy Boon, who was Anne’s friend; and by Nanette Stein, who was Katharine’s. Now Ramsay was here, tall as a tree to the stooping child. When Ramsay said something to him, in French, he did not look, he went deaf, he muttered and sang to himself; and Ramsay, who had offered dominoes, and would have let the boy win the game, limped on up to the house, feeling wasted.