“We ate chicken,” said Cathie Collier, the elder girl.
“They say she served it up half raw,” said their grandmother’s maid. “Survet” said the maid for “served,” and that was not the way their mother had spoken. “The sheets was so dirty, the dirt was like clay. All of yez slept in the one bed,” said the maid.
“Yes, we slept together.” The apartment — a loft, they were told, over a garage; not an apartment at all — must still exist, it must be somewhere, with the piano that Mildred, the little one, had banged on with her palms flat. What about the two cats who were always fighting or playing, depending on their disposition? There were pictures on the wall, their mother’s, and the children’s own drawings.
“When one of the pictures was moved there was a square mass of bugs,” said the grandmother’s maid. “The same shape as the pitcher.”
“To the day I die,” said the social worker from Montreal to her colleague in Ontario, “I won’t forget the screams of Mildred when she was dragged out of that pigsty.” This was said in the grandmother’s parlor, where the three women — the two social workers, and the grandmother — sat with their feet freezing on the linoleum floor. The maid heard, and told. She had been in and out, serving coffee, coconut biscuits, and damson preserves in custard made of goat’s milk. The room was heated once or twice a year: even the maid said her feet were cold. But “To the day I die” was a phrase worth hearing. She liked the sound of that, and said it to the children. The maid was from a place called Waterloo, where, to hear her tell it, no one behaved strangely and all the rooms were warm.
Thumb-sucker Mildred did not remember having screamed, or anything at all except the trip from Montreal by train. “Boy, is your grandmother ever a rich old lady!” said the maid from Waterloo. “If she wasn’t, where’d you be? In an orphung asylum. She’s a Christian, I can tell you.” But another day, when she was angry with the grandmother over something, she said, “She’s a damned old sow. It’s in the mattress and she’s lying on it. You can hear the bills crackle when you turn the mattress Saturdays. I hope they find it when she dies, is all I can say.”
The girls saw their grandmother dead, in the bed, on that mattress. The person crying hardest in the room was the maid. She had suddenly dyed her hair dark red, and the girls did not know her, because of her tears, and her new clothes, and because of the way she fondled and kissed them. “We’ll never see each other again,” said the maid.
Now that their grandmother had died, the girls went to live with their mother’s brother and his wife and their many children. It was a suburb of Montreal called Ahuntsic. They did not see anything that reminded them of Montreal, and did not recall their mother. There was a parlor here full of cut glass, which was daily rubbed and polished, and two television sets, one for the use of the children. The girls slept on a pull-out divan and wrangled about bedclothes. Cathie wanted them pushed down between them in a sort of trough, because she felt a draft, but Mildred complained that the blankets thus arranged were tugged away from her side. She was not properly covered and afraid of falling on the floor. One of their relations (they had any number here on their mother’s side) made them a present of a box of chocolate almonds, but the cousins they lived with bought exactly the same box, so as to tease them. When Cathie and Mildred rushed to see if their own box was still where they had hidden it, they were bitterly mocked. Their Ontario grandmother’s will was not probated and every scrap of food they put in their mouths was taken from the mouths of cousins: so they were told. Their cousins made them afraid of ghosts. They put out the lights and said, “Look out, she is coming to get you, all in black,” and when Mildred began to whimper, Cathie said, “Our mother wouldn’t try to frighten us.” She had not spoken of her until now. One of the cousins said, “I’m talking about your old grandmother. Your mother isn’t dead.” They were shown their father’s grave, and made to kneel and pray. Their lives were in the dark now, in the dark of ghosts, whose transparent shadows stood round their bed; soon they lived in the black of nuns. Language was black, until they forgot their English. Until they spoke French, nothing but French, the family pretended not to understand them, and stared as if they were peering in the dark. They very soon forgot their English.
They could not stay here with these cousins forever, for the flat was too small. When they were eight and twelve, their grandmother’s will was probated and they were sent to school. For the first time in their lives, now, the girls did not sleep in the same bed. Mildred slept in a dormitory with the little girls, where a green light burned overhead, and a nun rustled and prayed or read beside a green lamp all night long. Mildred was bathed once every fortnight, wearing a rubber apron so that she would not see her own body. Like the other little girls, she dressed, in the morning, sitting on the floor, so that they would not see one another. Her thumb, sucked white, was taped to the palm of her hand. She caught glimpses of Cathie sometimes during recreation periods, but Cathie was one of the big girls, and important. She did not play, as the little ones still did, but walked up and down with the supervisor, walking backwards as the nun walked forward.
One day, looking out of a dormitory window, Mildred saw a rooftop and an open skylight. She said to a girl standing nearby, “That’s our house.” “What house?” “Where Mummy lives.” She said that sentence, three words, in English. She had not thought or spoken “Mummy” since she was six and a half. It turned out that she was lying about the house. Lying was serious; she was made to promenade through the classrooms carrying a large pair of shears and the sign “I am a liar.” She did not know the significance of the shears, nor, it seemed, did the nun who organized the punishment. It had always been associated with lying, and (the nun suddenly remembered) had to do with cutting out the liar’s tongue. The tattling girl, who had told about “Where Mummy lives,” was punished too, and made to carry a wastebasket from room to room with “I am a basket-carrier” hung round her neck. This meant a tale-bearer. Everyone was in the wrong.
Cathie was not obliged to wear a rubber apron in her bath, but a muslin shift. She learned the big girls’ trick, which was to take it off and dip it in water, and then bathe properly. When Mildred came round carrying her scissors and her sign Cathie had had her twice-monthly bath and felt damp and new. She said to someone, “That’s my sister,” but “sister” was a dark scowling little thing. “Sister” got into still more trouble: a nun, a stray from Belgium, perhaps as one refugee to another, said to Mildred, swiftly drawing her into a broom-cupboard, “Call me Maman.” “Maman” said the child, to whom “Mummy” had meaning until the day of the scissors. Who was there to hear what was said in the broom-cupboard? What basket-carrier repeated that? It was forbidden for nuns to have favorites, forbidden to have pet names for nuns, and the Belgian stray was sent to the damp wet room behind the chapel and given flower-arranging to attend to. There Mildred found her, by chance, and the nun said, “Get away, haven’t you made enough trouble for me?”
Cathie was told to pray for Mildred, the trouble-maker, but forgot. The omission weighed on her. She prayed for her mother, grandmother, father, herself (with a glimpse in the prayer of her own future coffin, white) and the uncles and aunts and cousins she knew and those she had never met. Her worry about forgetting Mildred in her prayers caused her to invent a formula: “Everyone I have ever known who is dead or alive, anyone I know now who is alive but might die, and anyone I shall ever know in the future.” She prayed for her best friend, who wanted like Cathie to become a teacher, and for a nun with a mustache who was jolly, and for her confessor, who liked to hear her playing the Radetzky March on the piano. Her hair grew lighter and was brushed and combed by her best friend.