“Bradley is Irmgard’s cousin,” her mother says.
Now Irmgard, who cannot remember anything, who looked for a paintbox when Freddy had gone, who doesn’t remember that she was kidnapped and that Bradley once saved her life — now Irmgard remembers something. It seems that Freddy was sent on an errand. He went off down the sidewalk, which was heaving, cracked, edged with ribbon grass; and when he came to a certain place he was no longer there. Something was waiting for him there, and when they came looking for him, only Irmgard knew that whatever had been waiting for Freddy was the disaster, the worst thing. Irmgard’s mother said, “Imagine sending a child near the woods at this time of day!” Sure enough, there were trees nearby. And only Irmgard knew that whatever had been waiting for Freddy had come out of the woods. It was the worst thing; and it could not be helped. But she does not know exactly what it was. And then, was it Freddy? It might have been Bradley, or even herself.
Naturally, no child should go near a strange forest. There are chances of getting lost. There is the witch who changes children into birds.
Irmgard grows red in the face and says loudly, “I remember my dream. Freddy went on a message and got lost.”
“Oh, no dreams at breakfast, please,” her father says.
“Nothing is as dreary as a dream,” her mother says, agreeing. “I think we might make a rule on that: no dreams at breakfast. Otherwise it gets to be a habit.”
Her father cheers up. Nothing cheers them up so fast as a new rule, for when it comes to making rules, they are as bad as children. You should see them at croquet.
Saturday
I
After the girl across the aisle had glanced at Gérard a few times (though he was not talking to her, not even trying to), she went down to sit at the front of the bus, near the driver. She left behind a bunch of dark, wet, purple lilac wrapped in wet newspaper. When Gérard followed to tell her, she did not even turn her head. Feeling foolish, he suddenly got down anywhere, in a part of Montreal he had never seen before, and in no time at all he was lost. He stood on the curb of a gloomy little street recently swept by a spring tempest of snow. A few people, bundled as Russians, scuffled by. A winter haze like a winter evening sifted down through a lattice of iron and steel. The sudden lowering of day, he saw, was caused by an overhead railway. This railway was smart and new, as if it had been unpacked out of sawdust quite recently and snapped into place.
What was it for? “Of all the unnecessary …” Gérard muttered, just as his father might. Talking aloud to oneself was a family habit. You could grumble away for minutes at home without anyone’s taking the least notice. “Yes, they have to spend our money somehow,” he went on, just as if he were old enough to vote and pay taxes. Luckily no one heard him. Everyone’s attention had been fixed by a funeral procession of limousines grinding along in inches of slush. The Russian bundles crossed themselves, but Gérard kept his hands in his pockets. “Clogging up the streets,” he offered, as an opinion about dying and being taken somewhere for burial. At that moment the last cars broke away, climbed the curb, and continued along the sidewalk. Gérard pressed back to the wall behind him, as he saw the others doing. No one appeared astonished, and he supposed that down here, in the east end, where there was a funeral a minute, this was the custom. “Otherwise you’d never have any normal traffic,” he said. “Only all these hearses.”
He thought, all at once, Why is everybody looking at me?
He was smiling. That was why. He could not help smiling. It was like a cinématèque comedy — the black cars in the whitish fog, the solemn bystanders wiping their noses on their gloves and crossing themselves, and everyone in winter cocoon clothes, with a white bubble of breath. But it was not black and gray, like an old film: it was the color of winter and cities, brown and brick and sand. What was more, the friends and relations of the dead were now descending from their stopped cars, and he feared that his smile might have offended them, or made him seem gross and unfeeling; and so, in a propitiatory gesture he at once regretted, he touched his forehead, his chest, and a point on each shoulder.
He had never done this for himself. Until now, he had never craved approval. From the look of the mourners, they were all Protestants anyway. He wanted to tell them he had crossed himself by mistake; that he was an atheist, from a singular and perhaps a unique family of anti-clerics. But the mourners were too grieved to pay attention. Even the men were sobbing. They held their hands against their mouths, they blinked and choked, they all but doubled over with pain — they were laughing at something. Perhaps at Gérard? Well, they were terrible people. He had always known. He was relieved to see one well-behaved person among them. She had been carried from her car and placed, with gentle care, in a collapsible aluminum wheelchair. Loving friends attended her, one to hold her purse, another to tie her scarf, a third to tuck a fur robe around her knees. Gérard had often been ill, and he recognized on her face the look of someone who knows about separateness and nightmares and all the vile tricks that the body can play. Her hair was careless, soft, and long, but the face seemed thirty, which was, to him, rather old. She turned her dark head and he heard her say gravely, “Not since the liberation of Elizabeth Barrett …”
The coffin lay in the road. It had been let down from a truck, parked there as if workmen were about to jump out and begin shovelling snow or mending the pavement. The dead man must have left eccentric instructions, Gérard thought, for his coffin was nothing more than pieces of brown carton stapled together in a rough shape. The staples were slipping out: that was how carelessly and above all how cheaply the thing had been done. Gérard had a glimpse of a dark suit and a watch chain before he looked away. The hands, he saw, rested upon a long white envelope. He was to be buried with a packet of securities, as all Protestants probably were. The crippled woman touched Gérard on the arm and said, “Just reach over and get it, will you?” — that way, casually, used to service. No one stopped Gérard or asked him what he thought he was doing. As he slipped the envelope away he knew that this impertinence, this violation, would turn the dead man into a fury where he was concerned. By his desire to be agreeable, Gérard had deliberately and foolishly given himself some bad nights.
Jazz from an all-night program invaded the house until Gérard’s mother, discovering its source in the kitchen, turned the radio off. She supposed Gérard had walked in his sleep. What else could she think when she found him kneeling, in the dark, with his head against the refrigerator door? Beside him was a smashed plate and the leftover ham that had been on it, and an overturned stool. She knelt too, and drew his head on her shoulder. His father stood in the doorway. The long underwear he wore at all times and in every season showed at his wrists and ankles, where the pajamas stopped. Without his teeth and without his glasses he seemed younger and clearer about the eyes, but frighteningly helpless and almost female. His head and his hands were splashed with large, soft-looking freckles.