Going Ashore Page 5

  “You people Carthlic?” one of the fathers from over the river asked me once, as if that would explain a lot.

  Mercifully, I was able to say no. I knew we were not Catholic because at the Pensionnat Saint-Louis de Gonzague, in Montreal, which I attended, I had passed the age at which children usually took the First Communion. For a year and more, my classmates had been attending morning chapel in white veils, while I still wore a plain, stiff, pre-Communion black veil that smelled of convent parlors, and marked me as one outside the limits of grace.

  “Then why’s your dad always around the frogs?” asked the English father.

  Drôle de père indeed. I had to agree with Pauline. He was not like any father I had met or read about. He was not Elsie’s Mr. Dinsmore, stern but swayed by tears. Nor did he in the least resemble Mr. Bobbsey, of the Bobbsey Twins books, or Mr. Bunker, of the Six Little Bunkers. I was never scolded, or rebuked, or reminded to brush my teeth or say my prayers. My father was perfectly content to live his own summer and let me live mine, which did not please me in the least. If, at meals, I failed to drink my milk, it was I who had to mention this omission. When I came home from swimming with my hair wet, it was I who had to remind him that, because of some ear trouble that was a hangover of scarlet fever, I was supposed to wear a bathing cap. When Lon Chaney in The Hunchback of Notre Dame finally arrived at the cinema, he did not say a word about my not going, even though Lily and Winnie and many of the French-Canadian children were not allowed to attend, and boasted about the restriction.

  Oddly, he did have one or two notions about the correct upbringing of children, which were, to me, just as exasperating as his omissions. Somewhere in the back of his mind lingered a recollection that all little girls were taught French and music. I don’t know where the little girls of the England of his childhood were sent to learn their French – presumably to France – but I was placed, one month after my fourth birthday, in the Pensionnat, where for two years I had the petted privilege of being the youngest boarder in the history of the school. My piano lessons had also begun at four, but lasted only a short time, for, as the nun in charge of music explained, I could not remember or sit still, and my hand was too small to span an octave. Music had then been dropped as one of my accomplishments until that summer, when, persuaded by someone who obviously had my welfare at heart, my father dispatched me twice a week to study piano with a Madame Tessier, the convent-educated wife of a farmer, whose parlor was furnished entirely with wicker and over whose household hung a faint smell of dung, owing to the proximity of the outbuildings and the intense humidity of summer weather in the St. Lawrence Valley. Together, Madame Tessier and I sweated it out, plodding away against my lack of talent, my absence of interest, and my strong but unspoken desire to be somewhere else.

  “Cette enfant ne fera jamais rien,” I once heard her say in despair.

  We had been at it four or five weeks before she discovered at least part of the trouble; it was simply that there was no piano at home, so I never practiced. After every lesson, she had marked with care the scales I was to master, yet, week after week, I produced only those jerky, hesitant sounds that are such agony for music teachers and the people in the next room.

  “You might as well tell your father there’s no use carrying on unless you have a piano,” she said.

  I was only too happy, and told him that afternoon, at lunch.

  “You mean you want me to get you a piano?” he said, looking around the dining room as if I had insisted it be installed, then and there, between the window and the mirrored china cabinet. How unreasonable I was!

  “But you make me take the lessons,” I said. How unreasonable he was!

  A friend of my father’s said to me, years later, “He never had the faintest idea what to do with you.” But it was equally true that I never had the faintest idea what to do with him. We did not, of course, get a piano, and Madame Tessier’s view was that because my father had no employment to speak of (she called him a flâneur), we simply couldn’t afford one – the depth of shame in a town where even the milkman’s daughters could play duets.

  No one took my father’s painting seriously as a daily round of work, least of all I. At one point during that summer, my father agreed to do a pastel portrait of the daughter of a Madame Gravelle, who lived in Montreal. (This was in the late twenties, when pastel drawings of children hung in every other sitting room.) The daughter, Liliane, who was my age or younger, was to be shown in her First Communion dress and veil. Madame Gravelle and Liliane drove out from Montreal, and while Liliane posed with docility, her mother hung about helpfully commenting. Here my father was neglecting to show in detail the pattern of the lace veil; there he had the wrong shade of blue for Liliane’s eyes; again, it was the matter of Liliane’s diamond cross. The cross, which hung from her neck, contained four diamonds on the horizontal segment and six on the vertical, and this treasure he had reduced to two unimpressive strokes.

  My father suggested that Madame Gravelle might be just as happy with a tinted photograph. No, said Madame Gravelle, she would not. Well, then, he suggested, how about a miniature? He knew of a miniaturist who worked from photographs, eliminating sittings, and whose fee was about four times his own. Madame Gravelle bore Liliane, her cross, and her veil back to Montreal, and my father went back to painting around the countryside and going out with his dogs.

  His failure weighed heavily on me, particularly after someone, possibly Pauline, told me that he was forever painting people who didn’t pay him a cent for doing it. He painted Pauline, mustache and all; he painted some of the French-Canadian children who came to play in our garden, and from whom I was learning a savory French vocabulary not taught at Pensionnat Saint-Louis de Gonzague; he very often sketched the little Wing children, whose family owned the village fish-and-chip store.

  The Wing children were solemn little Chinese, close in age and so tangled in lineage that it was impossible to sort them out as sisters, brothers, and cousins. Some of the adult Wings – brothers, and cousins – ran the fish-and-chip shop, and were said to own many similar establishments throughout Quebec and to be (although no one would have guessed it to see them) by far the richest people in the area. The interior of their store smelled wonderfully of frying grease and vinegar, and the walls were a mosaic of brightly painted tin signs advertising Player’s Mild, Orange Crush, Sweet Marie chocolate bars, and ginger ale. The smaller Wings, in the winter months, attended Anglican boarding schools in the west, at a discreet distance from the source of income. Their English was excellent and their French-Canadian idiom without flaw. Those nearest my age were Florence, Marjorie, Ronald, and Hugh. The older set of brothers and cousins – those of my father’s generation – had abrupt, utilitarian names: Tommy, Jimmy, George. The still older people – most of whom seldom came out from the rooms behind the shop – used their Chinese names. There was even a great-grandmother, who sat, shrunken and silent, by the great iron range where the chips swam in a bath of boiling fat.

  As the Wings had no garden, and were not permitted to play by the river, lest they fall in and drown, it was most often at my house that we played. If my father was out, we would stand at the door of his studio and peer in at the fascinating disorder.

  “What does he do?” Florence or Marjorie would say. “What does your father do?”

  “He paints!” Pauline would cry from the kitchen. She might, herself, consider him loony, but the privilege was hers. She worked there, not a pack of Chinese.

  It was late in the summer, in August, when, one afternoon, Florence and Marjorie and Ronald and Hugh came up from the gate escorting, like a convoy, one of the older Wings. They looked anxious and important. “Is your father here?” said the grown-up Wing.

  I ran to fetch my father, who had just started out for a walk. When we returned, Pauline and the older Wing, who turned out to be Jimmy, were arguing in French, she at the top of her voice, he almost inaudibly.

  “The kids talk about you a lot,”
said Jimmy Wing to my father. “They said you were a painter. We’re enlarging the store, and we want a new sign.”

  “A sign?”

  “I told you!” shrieked Pauline from the dining-room door, to which she had retreated. “Ce n’est pas un peintre comme ça.”

  “Un peintre, c’est un peintre,” said Jimmy Wing, imperturbable.

  My father looked at the little Wings, who were all looking up at him, and said, “Exactly. Un peintre, c’est un peintre. What sort of sign would you like?”

  The Wings didn’t know; they all began to talk at once. Something artistic, said Jimmy Wing, with the lettering fat and thin, imitation Chinese. Did my father know what he meant? Oh, yes. My father knew exactly.

  “Just ‘Wing’s Chips’?” my father asked. “Or would you like it in French – ‘Les Chips de Wing’?”

  “Oh, English,” said all the Wings, almost together. My father said later that the Chinese were terrible snobs.

  He painted the sign the next Sunday afternoon, not in the studio but out in the back garden, sitting on the wide kitchen steps. He lacquered it black, and painted – in red-and-gold characters, fat and thin – “Wing’s Chips,” and under this he put the name of the town and two curly little letters, “P.Q.,” for “Province of Quebec.”

  Tommy and Jimmy Wing and all the little ones came to fetch the sign the next day. The two men looked at it for a long time, while the little ones looked anxiously at them to see if they liked it. Finally, Jimmy Wing said, “It’s the most beautiful thing I ever saw.”

  The two men bore it away, the little Wings trailing behind, and hung it on a horizontal pole over the street in front of their shop, where it rocked in the hot, damp breeze from the river. I was hysterically proud of the sign and, for quite the first time, of my father. Everyone stopped before the shop and examined it. The French-Canadians admitted that it was pas mal, pas mal du tout, while the English adults said approvingly that he must have been paid a fine penny for it. I could not bring down our new stature by admitting that he had painted it as a favor, and that it was only after Jimmy and Tommy had insisted that he had said they could, if they liked, pay for the gold paint, since he had had to go to Montreal for it. Nor did I tell anyone how the Wings, burdened with gratitude, kept bringing us chips and ice cream.

  “Oh, yes, he was paid an awful lot,” I assured them all.

  Every day, I went to look at the sign, and I hung around the shop in case anyone wanted to ask me questions about it. There it was, “Wing’s Chips,” proof that my father was an ordinary workingman just like anybody else, and I pointed it out to as many people as I could, both English and French, until the summer ended and we went away.

  THE LEGACY

  (1954)

  LATE IN THE AFTERNOON after Mrs. Boldescu’s funeral, her four children returned to the shop on St. Eulalie Street, in Montreal, where they had lived when they were growing up. Victor, the youngest, drove quickly ahead, leaving, like an unfriendly country, the trampled grass of the cemetery and the sorrowing marble angels. Several blocks behind came Marina and the two older boys, Carol and Georgie, side by side in the long black car that had been hired for the day. Emptied of flowers, it still enclosed a sickly smell of lilies and of Carol’s violet horseshoe, that had borne on a taffeta ribbon the words “Good Luck to You, Mama.”

  These three sat in silence, collapsed against the prickling plush of the cushions. Marina was thankful that Victor had driven up from Bloomfield, New Jersey, in his own three-year-old Buick. It would have been too much at this moment to have shared the drive with his American wife, Peggy Ann, hearing her voice carried out on the hot city air as she exclaimed over the slummy landscape and congratulated her husband on his plucky triumph over environment. Glancing at Carol and Georgie, Marina decided they might not have cared. Their triumph had been of a different nature. They stared out of the car at brick façades, seemingly neither moved nor offended by the stunning ugliness of the streets that had held their childhood. Sometimes one of them sighed, the comfortable respiration of one who has wept.

  Remembering the funeral, Marina bent her head and traced a seam of her black linen suit where the dye had taken badly. Her brothers had cried with such abandon that they had commended themselves forever to Father Patenaude and every neighborhood woman at church. “Those bad pennies,” Marina had heard Father Patenaude say. “Bad pennies they were, but they loved their mother. They did all of this, you know.”

  By “all of this,” he meant the first-class funeral, the giant wreaths, the large plot they had purchased in perpetuum, to which their father’s coffin, until now at rest in a less imposing cemetery, had been removed. There was space in the new plot for them all, including Victor’s wife, who would, Marina thought, be grateful to know that thanks to her brothers-in-law’s foresight her bones need not be turned out, for lack of burial space, until the Day of Judgment. A smaller tract, spattered with the delicate shadow of a weeping willow, had been set aside for Victor’s children. He was the only one of her brothers who had married, and his as-yet-unconceived offspring were doomed to early extinction if one considered the space reserved for their remains. Marina could only imagine the vision of small crosses, sleeping babies, and praying cherubs that had been painted for Carol and Georgie. At the same time, she wondered what Victor felt about his brothers’ prescience. His expression at the funeral had been one of controlled alarm, perhaps because of his wife, whose fidgetings and whisperings had disturbed even the rolling tide of Carol’s and Georgie’s grief. These two had stared hard at Peggy Ann on the edge of the grave, and Georgie had remarked that nothing worthy of life or death was likely to come out of that blond, skinny drink of water – which Marina took to be a reference to the babies’ plot.

  The way they had been grouped at the funeral – Marina unwillingly pressed between her weeping brothers, Victor a little apart – had seemed to her prophetic. The strain of her mother’s long illness had made her superstitious. Visiting her mother at the hospital toward the end, she had seen an omen in every cloud, a message in a maple leaf that, on a treeless street, unexpectedly fell at her feet. Sometimes she felt that all of them had combined to kill their mother – Victor by behaving too well, the others by behaving badly, herself through the old-maidish asperity that had lately begun to creep through her conversation like an ink-stain. She had even blamed Father Patenaude, remembering, in her mother’s last moments, the cold comfort her mother had brought home from the confession box. Watching the final office of death, Marina waited for him to speak the words of reassurance her mother wanted; but nothing came, and Mrs. Boldescu was permitted to die without once being told that the mores of St. Eulalie Street and not her own inadequacies had permitted Victor’s escape into a Protestant marriage, and Georgie’s and Carol’s being led away again and again by the police.

  Marina had quarreled with Father Patenaude, right then and there in the hospital, where all the nurses could hear. The priest’s thin face had been pink with annoyance, and the embarrassment of Carol and Georgie caused them, later on, to press upon him a quite unnecessary check. His sins of omission – they had possibly been caused, she now realized, through nothing sterner than lack of imagination – were for God and not Marina to judge, Father Patenaude said.

  Mrs. Boldescu had only by courtesy been attached to his flock. She belonged by birth and breeding to the Greek Catholic Church, that easy resting place between Byzantium and Rome. The Father was French-Canadian, with the peasant distrust of all his race for the exotic. Perhaps, Marina thought, he had detected her mother’s contempt for the pretty, pallid Western saints, each with his crown of electric lights. In the soaring exaltation of her self-reproach, Father Patenaude must have sensed the richness of past devotions, seen the bearded priest, the masculine saints, the gold walls glittering behind the spears of candlelight, the hanging ruby lamp swaying in the thick incense-laden air. Victor’s marriage had probably offended him most. Even Georgie and Carol, for all their cosmic indiffere
nce to the affairs of their sister and brother, had been offended.

  However Mrs. Boldescu might deplore the deviation of her youngest son, she trusted his good business sense. It was to Victor that the shop had been left. Now, driving back to it for the final conference, Marina could not have said if Carol and Georgie minded. Their feelings toward each other as children had been so perfunctory that jealousy, then, would have struck any one of them as much too familiar to be comfortable. Of course, Carol and Georgie might have changed; meeting over their mother’s bed, after a separation of years, they had had no time to sift their memories, even had they chosen to do anything so out of character. Their greeting had been in the matter-of-fact tones of consanguinity, and Marina had retired at once to a flower-banked corner of the hospital room, so that her brothers might have scope and space for their emotions.

  The two had scarcely glanced at her again. Pale and tired, graced with only the ghost of a racial bloom they had long disavowed and now failed to recognize, Marina appeared to satisfy their image of a sister. To her, however, the first few moments had been webbed in strangeness, and she had watched her brothers as if they came from an alien land. They knelt by the bed, barred with the shadow of the hospital shade, their glossy, brilliantined heads bowed on clasped hands. Disliking their rings, their neckties, their easy tears, she remembered what had formed them, and saw behind her brothers a tunnel of moldering corridors, the gray and stifling walls of reformatories named for saints. Summoning this image, like a repeated apology, she was able to pardon the violet horseshoe, the scene of distracted remorse on the brink of the grave. Their strangeness vanished; boredom took its place. She remembered at last what her brothers were like – not the somber criminal of sociological texts, denied roller skates at a crucial age; still less the hero-villain of films; but simply men whose moments of megalomaniacal audacity were less depressing than their lack of common sense and taste. It was for their pleasure, she thought, that people manufactured ashtrays shaped like little outhouses, that curly-haired little girls in sailor suits were taught to tap-dance, and night-club singers gave voice to “Mother Machree” and “Eli, Eli.”