This overlapping in one room of French and English, of Catholic and Protestant — my parents’ way of being, and so to me life itself — was as unlikely, as unnatural to the Montreal climate as a school of tropical fish. Only later would I discover that most other people simply floated in mossy little ponds labeled “French and Catholic” or “English and Protestant,” never wondering what it might be like to step ashore; or wondering, perhaps, but weighing up the danger. To be out of a pond is to be in unmapped territory. The earth might be flat; you could fall over the edge quite easily. My parents and their friends were, in their way, explorers. They had in common a fear of being bored, which is a fear one can afford to nourish in times of prosperity and peace. It makes for the most ruthless kind of exclusiveness, based as it is on the belief that anyone can be the richest of this or cleverest of that and still be the dullest dog that ever barked. I wince even now remembering those wretched once-only guests who were put on trial for a Saturday night and unanimously condemned. This heartlessness apart, the winter circle shared an outlook, a kind of humor, a certain vocabulary of the mind. No one made any of the standard Montreal statements, such as “What a lot of books you’ve got! Don’t tell me you’ve read them,” or “I hear you’re some kind of artist. What do you really do?” Explorers like Dr. Chauchard and Mrs. Erskine and my mother and the rest recognized each other on sight; the recognition cut through disguisements of class, profession, religion, language, and even what poll takers call “other interests.”
Once you have jumped out of a social enclosure, your eye is bound to be on a real, a geographical elsewhere; theirs seemed to consist of a few cities of Europe with agreeable-sounding names like Vienna and Venice. The United States consisted only of Boston and Florida then. Adults went to Florida for therapeutic reasons — for chronic bronchitis, to recover from operations, for the sake of mysterious maladies that had no names and were called in obituaries “a long illness bravely borne.” Boston seemed to be an elegant little republic with its own parliament and flag. To English Montreal, cocooned in that other language nobody bothered to learn, the rest of the continent, Canada included, barely existed; travelers would disembark after long, sooty train trips expressing relief to be in the only city where there were decent restaurants and well-dressed women and where proper English could be heard. Elsewhere, then, became other people, and little groups would form where friends, to the tune of vast mutual admiration, could find a pleasing remoteness in each other. They resembled, in their yearnings, in their clinging together as a substitute for motion, in their craving for “someone to talk to,” the kind of marginal social clans you find today in the capitals of Eastern Europe.
I was in the dining room cutting up magazines. My mother brought her coffee cup in, sat down, and said, “Promise me you will never be caught in a situation where you have to compete with a younger woman.”
She must have been twenty-six at the very most; Mrs. Erskine was well over thirty. I suppose she was appraising the amount of pickle Mrs. Erskine was in. They had become rivals. With her pale braids, her stately figure, her eyes the color of a stoneware teapot, Mrs. Erskine seemed to me like a white statue with features painted on. I had heard my mother praising her beauty, but for a child she was too large, too still. “Age has its points,” my mother went on. “The longer your life goes on, the more chance it has to be interesting. Promise me that when you’re thirty you’ll have a lot to look back on.”
My mother had on her side her comparative youth, her quickness, her somewhat giddy intelligence. She had been married, as she said, “for ever and ever” and was afraid nothing would ever happen to her again. Mrs. Erskine’s chief advantage over my mother — being unmarried and available — was matched by an enviable biography. “Ah, don’t ask me for my life’s story now,” she would cry, settling back to tell it. When the others broke into that sighing, singing recital of cities they went in for, repeating strings of names that sounded like sleigh bells (Venice, London, Paris, Rome), Mrs. Erskine would narrow her stoneware eyes and annihilate my mother with “But Charlotte, I’ve been to all those places, I’ve seen all those people.” What, indeed, hadn’t she seen — crown princes dragged out of Rolls-Royces by cursing mobs, duchesses clutching their tiaras while being raped by anarchists, strikers in England kicking innocent little Border terriers.
“… And as for the Hungarians and that Béla Kun, let me tell you … tore the uniforms right off the Red Cross nurses … made them dance the Charleston naked on top of streetcars …”
“Linnet, wouldn’t you be better off in your room?”
The fear of the horde was in all of them; it haunted even their jokes. “Bolshevik” was now “bolshie,” to make it harmless. Petrograd had been their early youth; the Red years just after the war were still within earshot. They dreaded yet seemed drawn to tales of conspiracy and enormous might. The English among them were the first generation to have been raised on The Wind in the Willows. Their own Wild Wood was a dark political mystery; its rude inhabitants were still to be tamed. What was needed was a leader, a Badger. But when a Badger occurred they mistrusted him, too; my mother had impressed on me early that Mussolini was a “bad, wicked man.” Fortunate Mrs. Erskine had seen “those people” from legation windows; she had, in another defeat for my mother, been married twice, each time to a diplomat. The word “diplomat” had greater cachet then than it has now. Earlier in the century a diplomat was believed to have attended universities in more than one country, to have two or three languages at his disposal and some slender notion of geography and history. He could read and write quite easily, had probably been born in wedlock, possessed tact and discretion, and led an exemplary private life. Obviously there were no more of these paragons then than there might be now, but fewer were needed, because there were only half as many capitals. Those who did exist spun round and round the world, used for all they were worth, until they became like those coats that outlast their buttons, linings, and pockets: Your diplomat, recalled from Bulgaria, by now a mere warp and woof, would be given a new silk lining, bone buttons, have his collar turned, and, after a quick reading of Norse myths, would be shipped to Scandinavia. Mrs. Erskine, twice wedded to examples of these freshened garments, had been everywhere — everywhere my mother longed to be.
“My life,” said Mrs. Erskine. “Ah, Charlotte, don’t ask me to tell you everything — you’d never believe it!” My mother asked, and believed, and died in her heart along with Mrs. Erskine’s first husband, a Mr. Sparrow, shot to death in Berlin by a lunatic Russian refugee. (Out of the decency of his nature Mr. Sparrow had helped the refugee’s husband emigrate accompanied by a woman Mr. Sparrow had taken to be the Russian man’s wife.) In the hours that preceded his “going,” as Mrs. Erskine termed his death, Mr. Sparrow had turned into a totally other person, quite common and gross. She had seen exactly how he would rise from the dead for his next incarnation. She had said, “Now then, Alfred, I think it has been a blissful marriage but perhaps not blissful enough. As I am the best part of your karma, we are going to start all over again in another existence.” Mr. Sparrow, in his new coarse, uneducated voice, replied, “Believe you me, Bimbo, if I see you in another world, this time I’m making a detour.” His last words — not what every woman hopes to hear, probably, but nothing in my mother’s experience could come ankle-high to having a husband assassinated in Berlin by a crazy Russian. Mr. Erskine, the second husband, was not quite so interesting, for he merely “drank and drank and drank,” and finally, unwittingly, provided grounds for divorce. Since in those days adultery was the only acceptable grounds, the divorce ended his ambitions and transformed Mrs. Erskine into someone déclassée; it was not done for a woman to spoil a man’s career, and it was taken for granted that no man ever ruined his own. I am certain my mother did not see Mr. Sparrow as an ass and Mr. Erskine as a soak. They were men out of novels — half diplomat, half secret agent. The natural progress of such men was needed to drag women out of the dullness that seemed to be woman’s fate.