“What is it?”
“Howie Morenz.”
“Who is it? Are they chasing him?”
“No, they like him,” he said of the hockey player admired to the point of dementia. He seemed to stretch, as if trying to keep every bone in his body from touching a nerve; a look of helplessness such as I had never seen on a grown person gripped his face and he said this strange thing: “Crowds eat me. Noise eats me.” The kind of physical pain that makes one seem rat’s prey is summed up in my memory of this.
When we came abreast of the Ritz-Carlton after leaving Georgie’s apartment, my father paused. The lights within at that time of day were golden and warm. If I barely knew what “hotel” meant, never having stayed in one, I connected the lights with other snowy afternoons, with stupefying adult conversation (Oh, those shut-in velvet-draped unaired low-voice problems!) compensated for by creamy bitter hot chocolate poured out of a pink-and-white china pot.
“You missed your gootay,” he suddenly remembered. Established by my grandmother, “goûter” was the family word for tea. He often transformed French words, like putty, into shapes he could grasp. No, Georgie had not provided a goûter, other than the mint wafers, but it was not her fault — I had not been announced. Perhaps if I had not been so disagreeable with her, he might have proposed hot chocolate now, though I knew better than to ask. He merely pulled my scarf up over my nose and mouth, as if recalling something Uncle Raoul had advised. Breathing inside knitted wool was delicious — warm, moist, pungent when one had been sucking on mint candies, as now. He said, “You didn’t enjoy your visit much.”
“Not very,” through red wool.
“No matter,” he said. “You needn’t see Georgie again unless you want to,” and we walked on. He must have been smarting, for he liked me to be admired. When I was not being admired I was supposed to keep quiet. “You needn’t see Georgie again” was also a private decision about himself. He was barely thirty-one and had a full winter to live after this one — little more. Why? “Because I say so.” The answer seems to speak out of the lights, the stones, the snow; out of the crucial second when inner and outer forces join, and the environment becomes part of the enemy too.
Ward Mackey used to mention me as “Angus’s precocious pain in the neck,” which is better than nothing. Long after that afternoon, when I was about twenty, Mackey said to me, “Georgie didn’t play her cards well where he was concerned. There was a point where if she had just made one smart move she could have had him. Not for long, of course, but none of us knew that.”
What cards, I wonder. The cards have another meaning for me — they mean a trip, a death, a letter, tomorrow, next year. I saw only one move that Saturday: my father placed a card face up on the table and watched to see what Georgie made of it. She shrugged, let it rest. There she sits, looking puggy but capable, Angus waiting, the precocious pain in the neck turning pages, hoping to find something in the National Geographic harmful for children. I brush in memory against the spiderweb: what if she had picked it up, remarking in her smoky voice, “Yes, I can use that”? It was a low card, the kind that only a born gambler would risk as part of a long-term strategy. She would never have weakened a hand that way; she was not gambling but building. He took the card back and dropped his hand, and their long intermittent game came to an end. The card must have been the eight of clubs — “a female child.”
The Doctor
Who can remember now a picture called “The Doctor”? From 1891, when the original was painted, to the middle of the Depression, when it finally went out of style, reproductions of this work flowed into every crevice and corner of North America and the British Empire, swamping continents. Not even “The Angelus” supplied as rich a mixture of art and lesson. The two people in “The Angelus” are there to tell us clearly that the meek inherit nothing but seem not to mind; in “The Doctor” a cast of four enacts a more complex statement of Christian submission or Christian pessimism, depending on the beholder: God’s Will is manifested in a dying child, Helpless Materialism in a baffled physician, and Afflicted Humanity in the stricken parents. The parable is set in a spotless cottage; the child’s bed, composed of three chairs, is out of a doll’s house. In much of the world — the world as it was, so much smaller than now — two full generations were raised with the monochrome promise that existence is insoluble, tragedy static, poverty endearing, and heavenly justice a total mystery.
It must have come as a shock to overseas visitors when they discovered “The Doctor” incarnated as an oil painting in the Tate Gallery in London, in the company of other Victorian miseries entitled “Hopeless Dawn” and “The Last Day in the Old Home.” “The Doctor” had not been divinely inspired and distributed to chasten us after all, but was the work of someone called Sir Luke Fildes — nineteenth-century rationalist and atheist, for all anyone knew. Perhaps it was simply a scene from a three-decker novel, even a joke. In museum surroundings — classified, ticketed — “The Doctor” conveyed a new instruction: Death is sentimental, art is pretense.
Some people had always hated “The Doctor.” My father, for one. He said, “You surely don’t want that thing in your room.”
The argument (it became one) took place in Montreal, in a house that died long ago without leaving even a ghost. He was in his twenties, to match the century. I had been around about the length of your average major war. I had my way but do not remember how; neither tears nor temper ever worked. What probably won out was his wish to be agreeable to Dr. Chauchard, the pediatrician who had given me the engraving. My father seemed to like Chauchard, as he did most people — just well enough — while my mother, who carried an uncritical allegiance from person to person, belief to belief, had recently declared Chauchard to be mentally, morally, and spiritually without fault.
Dr. Chauchard must have been in his thirties then, but he seemed to me timeless, like God the Father. When he took the engraving down from the wall of his office, I understood him to be offering me a portrait of himself. My mother at first refused it, thinking I had asked; he assured her I had not, that he had merely been struck by my expression when I looked at the ailing child. “C’est une sensible,” he said — an appraisal my mother dismissed by saying I was as tough as a boot, which I truly believe to have been her opinion.
What I was sensitive to is nearly too plain to be signalled: the dying child, a girl, is the heart of the composition. The parents are in the shadow, where they belong. Their function is to be sorry. The doctor has only one patient; light from a tipped lampshade falls on her and her alone.
The street where Dr. Chauchard lived began to decline around the same time as the popularity of “The Doctor” and is now a slum. No citizens’ committee can restore the natural elegance of those gray stone houses, the swept steps, the glittering windows, because, short of a miracle, it cannot resurrect the kind of upper-bourgeois French Canadians who used to live there. They have not migrated or moved westward in the city — they have ceased to exist. The handful of dust they sprang from, with its powerful components of religion and history, is part of another clay. They were families who did not resent what were inaccurately called “the English” in Montreal; they had never acknowledged them. The men read a newspaper sometimes, the women never. The women had a dark version of faith for private drama, a family tree to memorize for intellectual exercise, intense family affection for the needs of the heart. Their houses, like Dr. Chauchard’s, smelled of cleanness as if cleanness were a commodity, a brand of floor wax. Convents used to have that smell; the girls raised in them brought to married life an ideal of housekeeping that was a memory of the polished convent corridor, with strict squares of sunlight falling where and as they should. Two sons and five daughters was the average for children; Simone, Pauline, Jeanne, Yvonne, and Louise the feminine names of the decade. The girls when young wore religious medals like golden flower petals on thin chains, had positive torrents of curls down to their shoulder blades, and came to children’s parties dressed in rose velvet and white stockings, too shy to speak. Chauchard, a bachelor, came out of this world, which I can describe best only through its girls and women.