Home Truths Read online

  PRAISE FOR MAVIS GALLANT’S FICTION:

  “The worlds Gallant creates are so complete that, as readers, we can live inside them. They have their own atmosphere, oxygen, colors, characters, dilemmas. We carry these stories around with us for days after we finish reading them because of their profound human ambiguities.… These stories lodge in our minds and become part of our happiness, the happiness of knowing that perfection, wrought from an imperfect world, is possible.”

  – Financial Post

  “One begins comparing her best moments to those of major figures in literary history. Names like Henry James, Chekhov and George Eliot dance across the mind. Gallant’s accomplishment is on an extraordinarily high level.”

  – Canadian Reader

  “Terrifyingly good.”

  – Margaret Atwood

  “She has written many short stories. My calculation suggests that she has written in this form at least the equivalent of twenty novels.”

  – Robertson Davies

  BOOKS BY MAVIS GALLANT

  DRAMA

  What Is to Be Done? (1983)

  ESSAYS

  Paris Notebooks: Essays and Reviews (1986)

  FICTION

  The Other Paris (stories, 1956)

  Green Water, Green Sky (novel, 1959)

  My Heart Is Broken (stories, 1964)

  A Fairly Good Time (novel, 1970)

  The Pegnitz Junction (stories, 1973)

  The End of the World (stories, 1974)

  From the Fifteenth District (stories, 1979)

  Home Truths (stories, 1981)

  Overhead in a Balloon (stories, 1985)

  In Transit (stories, 1988)

  Across the Bridge (stories, 1993)

  The Moslem Wife (stories, 1994)

  The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant (stories, 1996)

  Copyright © 1956, 1959, 1963, 1965, 1966, 1968, 1971, 1975, 1976, 1977, 1978, 1981 by Mavis Gallant

  First published by Macmillan of Canada, 1981

  First Emblem Editions publication 2001

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,

  photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher – or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency – is an infringement of the copyright law.

  National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Gallant, Mavis, 1922-

  Home truths

  eISBN: 978-1-55199-628-8

  I. Title.

  PS8513.A593H65 2001 C813’.54 C2001-900792-2

  PR9199.3.G35H65 2001

  We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program for our publishing activities. We further acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.

  “With a Capital T” was first published in Canadian Fiction Magazine. All other stories originally appeared in The New Yorker.

  SERIES EDITOR: ELLEN SELIGMAN

  Series logo design: Brian Bean

  EMBLEM EDITIONS

  McClelland & Stewart Ltd.

  75 Sherbourne Street,

  Toronto, Ontario

  M5A 2P9

  www.mcclelland.com/emblem

  v3.1

  To Nelly McMillan

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  AT HOME

  Thank You for the Lovely Tea

  Jorinda and Jorindel

  Saturday

  Up North

  Orphans’ Progress

  The Prodigal Parent

  CANADIANS ABROAD

  In the Tunnel

  The Ice Wagon Going Down the Street

  Bonaventure

  Virus X

  LINNET MUIR

  In Youth Is Pleasure

  Between Zero and One

  Varieties of Exile

  Voices Lost in Snow

  The Doctor

  With a Capital T

  About the Author

  AT HOME

  Thank You for the Lovely Tea

  That year, it began to rain on the twenty-fourth of May – a holiday still called, some thirty years after her death, Queen Victoria’s Birthday. It rained – this was Canada – until the middle of June. The girls, kept indoors, exercising listlessly in the gym, quarrelled over nothing, and complained of headache. Between showers they walked along spongy gravel paths, knocking against spiraea bushes that suddenly spattered them with water and white. It was the last lap of term, the dead period between the end of exams and the start of freedom. Handicrafts and extra art classes were improvised to keep them busy, but it was hopeless; glooming over their desks, they quarrelled, dreamed of summer, wrote plaintive letters home. Their raincoats were suddenly hot and heavy, their long black stockings scratchy and damp.

  “Life is Hell,” Ruth Cook wrote on the lid of a desk, hoping that someone would see it and that there would be a row. It was the slow time of day – four o’clock. Yawning over a drawing of flowerpots during art class, she looked despairingly out the streaked window and saw Mrs. Holland coming up the walk. Mrs. Holland looked smart, from that distance. Her umbrella was furled. On her head was a small hat, tilted to one side, circled with a feather. She looked smart but smudged, as if paint had spilled over the outline of a drawing. Ruth took her in coldly, leaning on a plump, grubby hand. Mrs. Holland was untidy – she had heard people say so. She was emotional. This, too, Ruth had overheard, always said with disapproval. Emotion meant “being American”; it meant placing yourself unarmed in the hands of the enemy. Emotion meant not getting one’s lipstick on straight, a marcel wave coming apart in wild strands. It accounted for Mrs. Holland’s anxious blue eyes, for the button missing on a blouse, the odds and ends forever falling out of purse or pocket. Emotion was worse than bad taste; it was calamitous. Ruth had only to look at Mrs. Holland to see what it led to. Mrs. Holland passed up the front steps and out of sight. Ruth went back to her bold lettering: “Life is Hell.” Any other girl in the room, she thought with satisfaction, would have gone importantly up to the desk and whispered that a lady had come to take her to tea, and could she please go and get ready now? But Ruth knew that things happened in their own good time. She looked at her drawing, admired it, and added more flowerpots, diminishing to a fixed point at the center of the page.

  “Well done,” said Miss Fischer, the art teacher, falsely, strolling between the ranks of desks. If she saw “Life is Hell,” she failed to comment. They were all cowards; there was no one to fight. “Your horizon line is too low,” said Miss Fischer. “Look at the blackboard; see how I have shown Proportion.”

  Indicating patience and self-control, Ruth looked at the blackboard, over it, around it. The blackboard was filled with receding lines, the lesson having dealt with Perspective as well as Proportion. Over it hung a photograph of the King – the late King, that is. He had died that year, and so had Kipling (although far less fuss was made about him), and the girls had to get used to calling Kipling “our late beloved poet” and the Prince of Wales “King Edward.” It was hopeless where the Prince was concerned, for there hung the real King still, with his stiff, elegant Queen by his side. He had died on a cold January day. They had prayed for him in chapel. His picture was in their prayer books because he was head of the Church – something like that. “It is a year of change,” the headmistress had said, announcing his death.

  “It’s a year of change, all right,” Ruth
said softly, imitating the headmistress’s English accent. Even the term “headmistress” was new; the old girl, who had retired to a cottage and a faithful spinster friend, had been content with “principal.” But the new one, blond, breathless, pink-cheeked, was fresh from England, full of notions, and felt that the place wanted stirring up. “I’m afraid I am progress-minded,” she told the stone-faced, wary girls. “We must learn never to fear change, provided it is for the best.” But they did fear it; they were shocked when the tinted image of George V was taken down from the dining-room wall and the famous picture of the Prince of Wales inspecting the front during the Great War put in its place. The Prince in the photo was a handsome boy, blond, fresh, pink-cheeked – much like the new headmistress, in fact. “A year of change,” the headmistress repeated, as if to impress it forever on their minds.

  Scrubbing at her flowerpots with artgum, Ruth thought it over and decided there had been no real change. She had never met the King and didn’t care for poetry. She was still in school. Her mother had gone to live abroad, but then she had never been around much. The only difference was that her father had met unfortunate Mrs. Holland.

  Coming into the flagged entrance hall, Mrs. Holland was daunted by the chilly gloom. She stared at the row of raincoats hanging from pegs, the sombre portraits of businessmen and clergymen on the walls. Governess-trained, she considered herself hopelessly untutored, and attached to the smell of drying coats an atmosphere of learning. Someone came, and went off to fetch the headmistress. Mrs. Holland sat down on a carved bench that looked like a pew. Irreligious but fond of saying she would believe in something if only she could, she gazed with respectful interest at the oil portrait of the school’s chief financial rock, a fruit importer who had abandoned Presbyterianism for the Church of England when a sudden rise in wealth and status demanded the change. Although he wore a gay checked suit and looked every inch himself, a smalltown Presbyterian go-getter, Mrs. Holland felt he must, surely, be some sort of Anglican dignitary; his portrait was so much larger than the rest; besides, the hall was so hushed and damp that religion had to come into it somewhere. She recalled a story she had been told – that the school had been a Bernardine abbey, transported from England to Canada stone by stone. The lightless corridors, the smell of damp rot emanating from the linen cupboards, the drafts, the cunning Gothic windows with Tudor panes, the dark classrooms and sweating walls, the chill, the cold, the damp, the discomfort, wistfully British, staunchly religious, all suggested this might indeed have been the case. How nice for the girls, Mrs. Holland thought, vaguely but sincerely.

  In point of fact, the school had never been an abbey. Each of its clammy stones had been quarried in North America, and the architectural ragout was deliberate; it was intended to provide the pupils with character and background otherwise lacking in a new continent. As for the fruit importer, the size of his portrait had to do only with the size of his endowment. The endowment had been enormous; the school was so superlatively uncomfortable that it cost a fortune to run. The fruit importer’s family had been – still were – exceedingly annoyed. They wished he would take up golf and quit meddling in church affairs. He could not help meddling. Presbyterianism had left its scar. Still, he felt uneasy, he was bound to admit, if there were nuns about, or too much incense. Hence his only injunction, most difficult to follow: The school should be neither too High nor too Low. Every regime had interpreted this differently. The retiring principal, to avoid the vulgarity of being Low, had brought in candles and Evensong. The new headmistress, for her part, found things disturbingly High, almost Romish. The white veils the girls wore to chapel distressed her. They were so long that they made the girls look like Carmelite nuns, at least from the waist up. From the waist down, they looked like circus riders, with their black-stockinged legs exposed to garter level. The pleated serge tunics were worn so short, in fact, that the older girls, plump with adolescence, could not sit down without baring a pink inch between tunic and stocking top. The modernism she had threatened took form. She issued an order: lengthen the tunics, shorten the veils. Modernism met with a mulish and unaccountable resistance. Who would have believed that young girls, children of a New World, would so obstinately defend tradition? Modernism, broadmindedness foundered. The headmistress gave up the fight, though not her claim to the qualities in which she took greatest pride.

  It was broadmindedness now that compelled her to welcome Mrs. Holland briskly and cordially, ignoring Mrs. Holland’s slightly clouded glance and the cigarette stain on the hand she extended. Ruth’s father had rung up about tea, so it was quite in order to let Ruth go; still, Mrs. Holland was a family friend, not a parent – a distinction that carried its own procedure. It meant that she need not be received in the private sitting room and given cake but must wait in the office. It meant that Ruth was not to go alone but must be accompanied by a classmate. Waved into the office, Mrs. Holland sat down once more. She propped her umbrella against her chair, offered the headmistress a cigarette. The umbrella slid and fell with a clatter. The cigarette was refused. Reaching for her umbrella, Mrs. Holland tipped her case upside down, and cigarettes rolled everywhere. The headmistress, smiling, helped collect them, marvelling at the variety of experience inherent in teaching, at the personal tolerance that permitted her contact with a woman of Mrs. Holland’s sort.

  “My hair’s all undone, too,” said Mrs. Holland, wretchedly, clutching her properties. And, really, watching her, one felt she had too much for any one woman to handle – purse, umbrella, and gloves.

  The headmistress retrieved the last cigarette and furtively dropped it in the wastebasket. “With all this rain, one can hardly cope with one’s hair,” she said, almost as cordially as if Mrs. Holland were a parent. Resolved to be lenient, she remembered that Ruth’s father’s money did, after all, lend the situation a certain amount of social decency. The headmistress had heard, soon after her arrival, this wayward story of divorce and confusion – Ruth’s parents divorced; Ruth’s mother, who had behaved badly, gone abroad; the sudden emergence of Mrs. Holland – and she had decided that Ruth ought to be watched. There might be tendencies – what someone less broadminded might have called bad blood. But Ruth was a placid girl, to all appearances – plump, lazy, rather Latin in looks, with glossy blue-black hair, which she brushed into drooping ringlets. In spite of the laziness, one could detect a nascent sense of leadership; she was quite bossy, in fact. The headmistress was satisfied; like the school, the imitation abbey, Ruth was almost the real thing.

  Summoned, Ruth came in her own good time. Conversation between the two women had frozen, and they turned to the door with relief. Ruth was trailing not one friend but two, May Watson and Helen McDonnell. The three girls stood, berets on their heads, carrying raincoats. Their long black legs looked more absurd than ever. They shook hands with Mrs. Holland, mumbling courteously. For some reason, they gave the appearance of glowering, rather like the portraits in the hall.

  “What time do we have to be back, please?” said Ruth.

  “I expect Mrs. Holland will want to bring you back soon after tea,” said the headmistress. She made a nervous movement toward Mrs. Holland, who, however, was collecting her belongings without difficulty. The girls were being taken to the tearoom of a department store, Mrs. Holland said. “I am pleased,” said the headmistress, too enthusiastically. The girls glanced at her with suspicion. But her pleasure was authentic; she had feared that they might be going to Ruth’s house, where Mrs. Holland, the family friend, might seem too much at home. Mrs. Holland pressed on the headmistress a warm, frantic farewell and followed the girls out. It had begun to rain again, the slow warm rain of June. Mrs. Holland, distracted, stopped to admire the Tudor-Gothic façade of the school, feeling that this was expected, and was recalled by the fidgeting of her charges. There was more fumbling, this time for car keys, and, at last, they were settled – Ruth in front, as a matter of course (the car was her father’s), and Helen and May in back.

  “Out o
f jail,” said Ruth, pulling off her beret and shaking out her hair.

  “Is it jail, dear? Do you hate it?” said Mrs. Holland. She drove carefully away from the curb, mindful of her responsibilities. “Would you rather –”

  “Oh, Ruth,” Helen protested, from the back. “You don’t mean it.”

  “Jail,” said Ruth, but without much interest. She groped in the side pocket on the door and said, “I left a chocolate bar here last time I was out. Who ate it?”

  “Perhaps your father,” said Mrs. Holland, wishing Helen had not interrupted that most promising lead about hating school.

  “He hates chocolate. You know that. He’d be the last person to eat it. But honestly,” she said, placid again, “just listen to me. As if it even mattered.”

  Situations like this were Mrs. Holland’s undoing. The absence of the chocolate bar, Ruth’s young, averted profile, made her feel anxious and guilty. The young, to her, were exigent, full of mystery, to be wooed and placated. “Shall we stop somewhere and get another chocolate bar?” she said. “Would you like that?”

  It was terrible to see a grown woman so on the defensive, made uneasy by someone like Ruth. Helen McDonnell, taller than the others, blond, ill at ease, repeated her eternal prayer that she might never grow up and be made unhappy. As far as she knew, there were no happy adults, other than teachers. She looked at May, to see if she had noticed and if she minded, but May had turned away and was staring at her pale, freckled reflection in the window, thrown back from the dark of the rainy streets. She knew that May was grieving for an identical face, that of her twin, who this year had been sent to another school, across the continent. Driving through thicket suburbs and into town now, they passed May’s house, a white house set back on a lawn.

  “There’s your house, May,” Ruth said, twisting around on the front seat. “How come you’re a boarder when you are right near?”