Hearing it, the children went on eating their supper, unmoved. Family conversation usually slanted in a single direction. “You’ll see I was right!” and “Believe you me, one day you’ll wish you’d listened!” and the shadowy, the mysterious “Remember me when the time comes.” Unlike most parents on their street, the Quales did not beat their children, but they kept saying they ought to, and that the kids were asking for it. Any day now Mrs. Quale would take the broom to them and Mr. Quale start swinging the buckle end of his belt. Leo believed it might happen, though he could have knocked his father down with a shove; Lily, who was intelligent, did not.
Mr. Mitchell Coleman, elected by my aunt to be an example for me, had to resign from the prep school in Montreal where he taught English and art. She passed on the news in a cluster of baffling remarks: it was a great shock to his friends, he had betrayed a trust, he had to live with his conscience, only God could judge, and he would never set foot here again.
I thought he had pilfered something. It was the worst I could imagine as adult bad behavior. My aunt had a friend who borrowed small objects. (We never said “stole.”) Her husband would go through her handbag at night and find an ivory carving, a butter knife, a china soap dish. I was not expected to have opinions about grown people. Once, I had imitated Mr. Coleman’s way of standing in front of a bookcase, reading titles in an undertone, and my aunt had reproached me for mocking a man of moral worth, whose very friendship confirmed our own decency. Now she was in a close predicament, needing to let me know he had fallen and at once describing and concealing the nature of the fall.
Dilemmas of upbringing were often referred to my father, whose delayed seaborne answer was likely to be “Have it out with him.” Having it out terrified her. She gave me a glass of ginger ale and three squares of cocoa fudge on a bread plate and made me sit down in the parlor, facing her but at a distance. I ate the fudge, then the crumbs. Meanwhile she said that Mr. Coleman’s badness was an example of reality. Until now, “reality” had meant having no money. In her way she was as deft at dealing out a bleak future as any parent across the river. Poverty and high principle seemed to occupy the same terrain — to my mind, a vacant lot. I knew some of the discourse by heart: my father was unlikely to amass any capital out in China; one day I might have nothing to fall back on but a clean reputation. Better to run out of worldly goods than the world’s good opinion, she said, never having been faced with the choice.
What was she trying to tell me? She knew, but wished she had a man there to take over the notes and deliver the lecture. It was for my benefit that she invited so many inspirational male figures to meals. Her generation of women attached no secondary meaning to “confirmed bachelor” or “not the marrying kind.” Some men got along without a wife. English novels were full of them. Occasionally one of those bluff and taciturn heroes got tired of eating cold suppers and let himself be overtaken by a fresh-faced, no-nonsense country girl. That was fiction: in the real world homosexuality was a criminal offense, liable to a sentence in a penitentiary. For that reason, scores of thoroughly unmarriageable men had to let themselves be seen as a catch, without getting caught. My aunt was a social godsend, for she was attractive and kind, a widow who did not want to remarry (“Steven wouldn’t like it”), and, apparently, bleached of desire. At least, she sent none of those coded messages over the female telegraph, meant to be deciphered only by selected men. Or, perhaps she sent explicit signals and was puzzled because no answer came. Or, owing to the amazing boundlessness of ambiguity, may have received more replies than anyone guessed.
At the time I am telling about, she was calm and cheerful, wore her glossy hair parted in the middle, had a supply of single acquaintances described as brainy, therefore harmless, masculine by denomination and ego, willing to take the train or drive down from Montreal, receive one glass of dark sherry, eat a well-done roast and Yorkshire pudding, and put up with me.
Boyd McAllister arrived in a roadster that had the shine and color of a new chestnut. I climbed into the rumble seat, by way of a step the size of a piano pedal, and he took me for a spin along the river. My aunt shamed me by calling, “Don’t fall in!” Ray Archer turned up slightly drunk, wearing a kilt, and got just his food: no sherry. Later, my aunt said he had no right to a clan tartan, not even on his mother’s side. Herbie Dunn, just back from London, had seen Jack Buchanan singing and dancing, wearing a top hat. He gave my aunt a Buchanan record, “I’m in a Dancing Mood.” We played it on the gramophone and he showed us some steps.
“Now, Steven, watch Mr. Dunn,” my aunt said, as if this, too, were part of a virile education.
But the pleasures of adults are unbecoming. I looked out the parlor window, to the road and the river. More people walked than drove. There were French-Canadian boys dressed for Sunday, stiff and buttoned-up, and a few Anglos throwing sticks for their dogs. The English had on comfortable weekend clothes. To the French, they looked like hand-me-downs. “If you didn’t know who they were, you’d hand them a nickel,” our farmer neighbor once said. The river was the color of thin maple syrup. On the far side, in a spread of bungalows, was my Protestant school and the deep Catholic mystery of Lily and Leo.
In those days people owned just a few clothes, no more than they needed. A garment was part of one’s singularity. Our teachers put on the same things day after day — the same dress, the same shoes, the same crumpled suit. Leo was his plaid shirt and navy-blue sweater, Lily her red coat and knitted leggings. She pulled the leggings off when she got to school, revealing white cotton stockings, and draped them over the radiator, along with other snowy outfits. We were four grades to a room; the smell of the class was of wool drying. Whenever Lily tore her white stockings or got them dirty her crazy mother would scream, “I’ll whip you, Lily Quale, I swear to God!” but Lily took no notice.
Mitchell Coleman came to Sunday dinner in blazer and flannels, a white shirt, and a striped tie, gray and maroon. He probably had been cautioned from childhood to be neat and clean, even where it didn’t show, in case he got knocked down by a streetcar and had to be carried to the Royal Victoria Hospital and undressed by strangers. With his exactly combed sandy hair, his jacket and trousers uncreased even after a train ride, he was ready for every kind of accident except the one he ran into.
I make him sound set and congealed, but he was in his early twenties, a local poet of the schoolmaster breed. He offered my aunt stapled, mimeographed editions of his work — long spans of verse in which Canada sprawled forbiddingly (nothing enticing about the national posture) between two bleak alternatives, the United States and the frozen North. I realize now that he was an early nationalist, a term that would have been as meaningless to my aunt as “reality” was to me. Her Canada was a satellite planet, reflecting the fire of English wars, English kings and queens, English habits and ways. My uncle had been killed at Ypres. The men she summoned to dinner matched in age the young officer in the sepia photograph in her bedroom.
Alone with me, in mock after-dinner conversation, Mr. Coleman looked elderly and oppressive. My aunt would leave us so that he could tell me about ideals heritable by men — apparently a richer legacy than any endowed on women. I could hear her in the dining room, clearing the table. She would not come to my rescue until it was time for Mr. Coleman to catch a train back to Montreal. He lived in a two-room apartment in the basement of a stone house on Bishop Street. His windows were just under the ceiling: looking up, he could watch the boots and shoes of strangers going by. It cost him twenty-two dollars a month, which my aunt said was high. That was all we knew about his private arrangements.