“Oh, for God’s sake, she’s only a child,” said my mother, as though that had ever been an excuse for anything.
Soon after the sofa-kicking incident she and Georgie moved into the hibernation known as “not speaking.” This, the lingering condition of hall my mother’s friendships, usually followed her having said the very thing no one wanted to hear, such as “Who wants to be called Edna May, anyway?”
Once more in the hot pale room where there was nothing to do and nothing for children, I offended my godmother again, by pretending I had never seen her before. The spot I had kicked was pointed out to me, though, owing to new slipcovers, real evidence was missing. My father was proud of my quite surprising memory, of its long backward reach and the minutiae of detail I could describe. My failure now to shine in a domain where I was naturally gifted, that did not require lessons or create litter and noise, must have annoyed him. I also see that my guileless-seeming needling of my godmother was a close adaptation of how my mother could be, and I attribute it to a child’s instinctive loyalty to the absent one. Giving me up, my godmother placed a silver dish of mint wafers where I could reach them — white, pink, and green, overlapping — and suggested I look at a magazine. Whatever the magazine was, I had probably seen it, for my mother subscribed to everything then. I may have turned the pages anyway, in case at home something had been censored for children. I felt and am certain I have not invented Georgie’s disappointment at not seeing Angus alone. She disliked Charlotte now, and so I supposed he came to call by himself, having no quarrel of his own; he was still close to the slighted Ward Mackey.
My father and Georgie talked for a while — she using people’s initials instead of their names, which my mother would not have done — and they drank what must have been sherry, if I think of the shape of the decanter. Then we left and went down to the street in a wood-paneled elevator that had sconce lights, as in a room. The end of the afternoon had a particular shade of color then, which is not tinted by distance or enhancement but has to do with how streets were lighted. Lamps were still gas, and their soft gradual blooming at dusk made the sky turn a peacock blue that slowly deepened to marine, then indigo. This uneven light falling in blurred pools gave the snow it touched a quality of phosphorescence, beyond which were night shadows in which no one lurked. There were few cars, little sound. A fresh snowfall would lie in the streets in a way that seemed natural. Sidewalks were dangerous, casually sanded; even on busy streets you found traces of the icy slides children’s feet had made. The reddish brown of the stone houses, the curve and slope of the streets, the constantly changing sky were satisfactory in a way that I now realize must have been aesthetically comfortable. This is what I saw when I read “city” in a book; I had no means of knowing that “city” one day would also mean drab, filthy, flat, or that city blocks could turn into dull squares without mystery.
We crossed Sherbrooke Street, starting down to catch our train. My father walked everywhere in all weathers. Already mined, colonized by an enemy prepared to destroy what it fed on, fighting it with every wrong weapon, squandering strength he should have been storing, stifling pain in silence rather than speaking up while there might have been time, he gave an impression of sternness that was a shield against suffering. One day we heard a mob roaring four syllables over and over, and we turned and went down a different street. That sound was starkly terrifying, something a child might liken to the baying of wolves.
“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 faceup 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.”
IN YOUTH IS PLEASURE
My father died, then my grandmother; my mother was left, but we did not get on. I was probably disagreeable with anyone who felt entitled to give me instructions and advice. We seldom lived under the same roof, which was just as well. She had found me civil and amusing until I was ten, at which time I was said to have become pert and obstinate. She was impulsive, generous, in some ways better than most other people, but without any feeling for cause and effect; this made her at the least unpredictable and at the most a serious element of danger. I was fascinated by her, though she worried me; then all at once I lost interest. I was fifteen when this happened. I would forget to answer her letters and even to open them. It was not rejection or anything so violent as dislike but a simple indifference I cannot account for. It was much the way I would be later with men I fell out of love with, but I was too young to know that then. As for my mother, whatever I thought, felt, said, wrote, and wore had always been a positive source of exasperation. From time to time she attempted to alter the form, the outward shape at least, of the creature she thought she was modeling, but at last she came to the conclusion there must be something wrong with the clay. Her final unexpected upsurge of attention coincided with my abrupt unconcern: One may well have been the reason for the other.