Mavis Gallant - Home Truths

When I was young I thought that men had small lives of their own creation. I could not see why, born enfranchised, without the obstacles and constraints attendant on women, they set such close limits for themselves and why, once the limits had been reached, they seemed so taken aback. I could not tell much difference between a man aged thirty-six, about, and one forty or fifty; it was impossible to fix the borderline of this apparent disappointment. There was a space of life I used to call “between Zero and One” and then came a long mystery. I supposed that men came up to their wall, their terminal point, quite a long way after One. At that time I was nineteen and we were losing the war. The news broadcast in Canada was flatly optimistic, read out in the detached nasal voices de rigueur for the CBC. They were voices that seemed to be saying, “Good or bad, it can’t affect us.” I worked in a building belonging to the federal government — it was a heavy Victorian structure of the sort that exists on every continent, wherever the British thought they’d come to stay. This one had been made out of the reddish-brown Montreal stone that colors, in memory, the streets of my childhood and that architects have no use for now. The office was full of old soldiers from one war before: Ypres (pronounced “Wipers”) and Vimy Ridge were real, as real as this minute, while Singapore, Pearl Harbor, Voronezh were the stuff of fiction. It seemed as if anything that befell the young, even dying, was bound to be trivial.

“Half of ’em’ll never see any fighting,” I often heard. “Anyway not like in the trenches.” We did have one veteran from the current war — Mac Kirkconnell, who’d had a knock on the head during his training and was now good for nothing except civilian life. He and two others were the only men under thirty left in the place. The other two were physical crocks, which was why they were not in uniform (a question demented women sometimes asked them in the street). Mr. Tracy had been snow-blinded after looking out of a train window for most of a sunny February day; he had recovered part of his sight but had to wear mauve glasses even by electric light. He was nice but strange, infirm. Mr. Curran, reputed to have one kidney, one lung, and one testicle, and who was the subject of endless rhymes and ditties on that account, was not so nice: he had not wanted a girl in the office and had argued against my being employed. Now that I was there he simply pretended that he had won. There were about a dozen other men — older, old. I can see every face, hear every syllable, which evoked, for me, a street, a suburb, a kind of schooling. I could hear just out of someone’s saying to me, “Say, Linnet, couja just gimme a hand here, please?” born here, born in Glasgow; immigrated early, late; raised in Montreal, no, farther west. I can see the rolled shirtsleeves, the braces, the eyeshades, the hunched shoulders, the elastic armbands, the paper cuffs they wore sometimes, the chopped-egg sandwiches in waxed paper, the apples, the oatmeal cookies (“Want any, Linnet? If you don’t eat lunch nobody’ll marry you”), the thermos flasks. Most of them lived thinly, paying for a bungalow, a duplex flat, a son’s education: a good Protestant education was not to be had for nothing then. I remember a day of dark spring snowstorms, ourselves reflected on the black windows, the pools of warm light here and there, the green-shaded lamps, the dramatic hiss and gurgle of the radiators that always sounded like the background to some emotional outburst, the sudden slackening at the end of the afternoon when every molecule of oxygen in the room had turned into poison. Assistant Chief Engineer Macaulay came plodding softly along the wintry room and laid something down on my desk. It was a collection of snapshots of a naked woman prancing and skipping in what I took to be the back yard of his house out in Cartierville. In one she was in a baby carriage with her legs spread over the sides, pretending to drink out of an infant’s bottle. The unknown that this represented was infinite. I also wondered what Mr. Macaulay wanted — he didn’t say. He remarked, shifting from foot to foot, “Now, Linnet, they tell me you like modern art.” I thought then, I think now, that the tunnel winters, the sudden darkness that April day, the years he’d had of this long green room, the knowledge that he would die and be buried “Assistant Chief Engineer Grade II” without having overtaken Chief Engineer McCreery had simply snapped the twig, the frail matchstick in the head that is all we have to keep us sensible.

Bertie Knox had a desk facing mine. He told the other men I’d gone red in the face when I saw Macaulay’s fat-arsed wife. (He hadn’t seen that one; I had turned it over, like a bad card.) The men teased me for blushing, and they said, “Wait till you get married, Linnet, you haven’t done with shocks.” Bertie Knox had been in this very office since the age of twelve. The walls had been a good solid gray then — not this drawing-room green. The men hadn’t been pampered and coddled, either. There wasn’t even a water cooler. You were fined for smoking, fined for lateness, fined for sick leave. He had worked the old ten-hour day and given every cent to his mother. Once he pinched a dime of it and his mother went for him. He locked himself in a cupboard. His mother took the door off its hinges and beat him blue with a wooden hanger. During the Depression, married, down to half pay, four kids in the house, he had shovelled snow for twenty cents an hour. “And none the worse for it,” he would always wind up. Most of the men seemed to have been raised in hardship by stern, desperate parents. What struck me was the good they thought it had done them (I had yet to meet an adult man with a poor opinion of himself) and their desire to impose the same broken fortunes on other people, particularly on the young — though not their own young, of course. There was a touch of sadness, a touch of envy to it, too. Bertie Knox had seen Mr. Macaulay and Mr. McCreery come in as Engineers Grade II, wet behind the ears, puffed up with their new degrees, “just a couple more college punks.” He said that engineering was the world’s most despised profession, occupied mainly by human apes. Instead of a degree he had a photograph of himself in full kilt, Highland Light Infantry, 1917: he had gone “home,” to a completely unknown Old Country, and joined up there. “Will you just look at that lad?” he would plead. “Do they come like him today? By God, they do not!” Bertie Knox could imitate any tone and accent, including mine. He could do a CBC announcer droning, “The British have ah taken ah Tobruk,” when we knew perfectly well the Germans had. (One good thing about the men was that when anything seemed hopeless they talked nonsense. The native traits of pessimism and constant grumbling returned only when there was nothing to grumble about.) Bertie Knox had a wooden leg, which he showed me; it was dressed in a maroon sock with clocks up the sides and a buckled garter. He had a collection of robust bawdy songs — as everyone (all the men, I mean) had in Canada, unless they were pretending — which I copied in a notebook, verse upon verse, with the necessary indications: Tune — “On, Wisconsin!” Tune — “Men of Harlech,” Tune — “We Gather Together to Ask the Lord’s Blessing.” Sometimes he took the notebook and corrected a word here and there. It doesn’t follow that he was a cheerful person. He laughed a lot but he never smiled. I don’t think he liked anyone, really.

The men were statisticians, draftsmen, civil engineers. Painted on the frosted glass of the office door was