Mavis Gallant - Home Truths

As soon as I realized that I was paid about half the salary men were earning, I decided to do half the work. I had spent much of my adolescence as a resourceful truant, evolving the good escape dodges that would serve one way and another all my life. At The Lantern I used reliable school methods. I would knock on a glass door — a door that had nothing to do with me.

“Well, Blanchard, what do you want?”

“Oh, Mr. Watchmaster — it’s just to tell you I’m going out to look something up.”

“What for?”

“An assignment.”

“Don’t tell me . Tell Amstutz.”

“He’s organizing fire-drill in case of air-raids.”

“Tell Cranach. He can tell Amstutz.”

“Mr. Cranach has gone to stop the art department from striking.”

“Striking? Don’t those buggers know there’s a war on? I’d like to see Accounting try that. What do they want now?”

“Conditions. They’re asking for conditions. Is it all right if I go now, Mr. Watchmaster?”

“You know what we need around here, don’t you? One German regiment. Regiment? What am I saying? Platoon . That’d take the mickey out of ’em. Teach them something about hard work. Loving your country. Your duty. Give me one trained German sergeant. I’d lead him in. ‘O.K. — you’ve been asking for this!’ Ratatatat. You wouldn’t hear any more guff about conditions. What’s your assignment?”

“The Old Presbyterians. They’ve decided they’re against killing people because of something God said to Moses.”

“Seditious bastards. Put ’em in work camps, the whole damned lot. All right, Blanchard, carry on.”

I would go home, wash my hair, listen to Billie Holiday records.

“Say, Blanchard, where the hell were you yesterday? Seventy-nine people were poisoned by ham sandwiches at a wedding party on Durocher Street. The sidewalk was like a morgue.”

“Actually, I just happened to be in Mr. Watchmaster’s office. But only for a minute.”

“Watchmaster’s got no right to ask you to do anything. One of these days I’m going to close in on him. I can’t right now — there’s a war on. The only good men we ever had in this country were killed in the last one. Look, next time Watchmaster gets you to run his errands, refer it to Cranach. Got that? All right, Blanchard, on your way.”

No good dodge works forever.

“Oh, Mr. Watchmaster, I just wanted to tell you I’m going out for an hour or two. I have to look something up. Mr. Cranach’s got his door locked, and Mr. Amstutz had to go home to see why his wife was crying.”

“Christ, what an outfit. What do you have to look up?”

“What Mussolini did to the Red Cross dogs. It’s for the ‘Whither Italy?’ supplement.”

“You don’t need to leave the building for that. You can get all you want by phone. You highbrows don’t even know what a phone is. Drop around Advertising some time and I’ll show you down-to-earth people using phones as working instruments. All you have to do is call the Red Cross, a veterinarian, an Italian priest, maybe an Italian restaurant, and a kennel. They’ll tell you all you need to know. Remember what Churchill said about Mussolini, eh? That he was a fine Christian gentleman. If you want my opinion, whatever those dogs got they deserved.”

Interviews were useful: you could get out and ride around in taxis and waste hours in hotel lobbies reading the new American magazines, which were increasingly difficult to find.

“I’m just checking something for The Lantern — do you mind?”

“Just so long as you don’t mar the merchandise. I’ve only got five Time , three Look , four Photoplay and two Ladies’ Home . Don’t wander away with the Esquire . There’s a war on.”

Once I was sent to interview my own godmother. Nobody knew I knew her, and I didn’t say. She was president of a committee that sent bundles to prisoners-of-war. The committee was launching an appeal for funds; that was the reason for the interview. I took down her name as if I had never heard it before: Miss Edna May Henderson. My parents had called her “Georgie,” though I don’t know why.

I had not seen my godmother since I was eight. My father had died, and I had been dragged away to be brought up in different cities. At eighteen, I had summoned her to a telephone: “It’s Linnet,” I said. “I’m here, in Montreal. I’ve come back to stay.”

“Linnet,” she said. “Good gracious me.” Her chain-smoker’s voice made me homesick, though it could not have been for a place — I was in it. Her voice, and her particular Montreal accent, were like the unexpected signatures that underwrite the past: If this much is true, you will tell yourself, then so is all the rest I have remembered.

She was too busy with her personal war drive to see me then, though she did ask for my phone number. She did not enquire where I had been since my father’s death, or if I had anything here to come back to. It is true that she and my mother had quarrelled years before; still, it was Georgie who had once renounced in my name “the devil and all his works, the vain pomp and glory of the world, with all covetous desires of the same, and carnal desires of the flesh.” She might have been curious to see the result of her bizarre undertaking, but a native canny Anglo-Montreal prudence held her still.

I was calling from a drugstore; I lived in one room of a cold-water flat in the east end. I said, “I’m completely on my own, and entirely self-supporting.” That was so Georgie would understand I was not looking for help; at all events, for nothing material.

I realize now how irregular, how fishy even, this must have sounded. Everybody has a phone, she was probably thinking. What is the girl trying to hide?

“Nothing” would have been the answer. There seemed no way to connect. She asked me to call her again in about a month’s time, but of course I never did.

My godmother spent most of her life in a block of granite designed to look like a fortress. Within the fortress were sprawling apartments, drawn to an Edwardian pattern of high ceilings, dark corridors, and enormous kitchens full of pipes. Churches and schools, banks and prisons, dwellings and railway stations were part of an imperial convallation that wound round the globe, designed to impress on the minds of indigenous populations that the builders had come to stay. In Georgie’s redoubt, the doorman was shabby and lame; he limped beside me along a gloomy passage as far as the elevator, where only one of the sconce lights fixed to the panelling still worked. I had expected someone else to answer my ring, but it was Georgie who let me in, took my coat, and indicated with a brusque gesture, as if I did not know any English, the mat where I was to leave my wet snowboots. It had not occurred to me to bring shoes. Padding into her drawing room on stockinged feet, I saw the flash photograph her memory would file as further evidence of Muir incompetence; for I believe to this day that she recognized me at once. I was the final product, the last living specimen of a strain of people whose imprudence, lack of foresight, and refusal to take anything seriously had left one generation after another unprepared and stranded, obliged to build life from the ground up, fashioning new materials every time.

My godmother was tall, though not so tall as I remembered. Her face was wide and flat. Her eyes were small, deep-set, slightly tilted, as if two invisible thumbs were pulling at her temples. Her skin was as coarse and lined as a farm woman’s; indifference to personal appearance of that kind used to be a matter of pride.