Grief, Memory, Three O'clock in the Morning: My Mavis Gallant Centennial Diary, Sunday, June 5

stop being mean to Mavis

St. Boniface, the actual saint, not the Winnipeg neighbour

3.33 a.m. June 5, Feast Day of Boniface, patron saint of brewers. Back to the store after two days off. Work schedule has changed, owing to the requirements occasioned by my promotion from shelf stocker to dry goods purchaser / order writer. Now that I’ve achieved the ranks of what I, and I alone, insist on calling “middle management” — the key to the executive loo hangs like a golden ring, just a carousel whirl away! — Friday and Saturday have been designated my days of rest, and welcome they are, too. Sunday is my Monday now, which sounds like some lamentable, forgotten pop song of the 60’s, the unsung B-side of a minor hit by The Carpenters, or Melanie. Feeling somewhat chipper, relatively well-rested. Spent a couple of pleasant days doing not much of note other than staring into the middle distance and having agreeable confabs in various bars — St. Boniface would be pleased — with three different Friends of Mavis, FOM.

Friday afternoon met Aynsley, in town from New York — what a pleasure to write that, it makes me sound so cosmopolitan, if only by association — for Happy Hour at Nightingale. Aynsley has made an appearance here before, in the Mavis Gallant (MG) diaries, I mean. You might recall it was she who related the story of meeting MG in Paris, in the late 90’s, at the home of the painter Joe Plaskett. Mavis’s advice to Aynsley — I’m not sure any advice was solicited, but it was disbursed, as elders are wont to do when seated at the table opposite the fresh-faced and vulnerable young and with a round or wedge of cheese between them — was to never cut the nose off the Brie.

Brought along for A. a copy of The End of the World, which was the first Canadian anthology of MG stories, published by McClelland and Stewart in 1974 in their New Canadian Library series (Number 91.) It has an introduction by Robert Weaver which MG is on record as saying she hated, though I can’t see why. It’s admiring, and doesn’t strike me as inaccurate, and a better friend to Canadian writers in the post-war years than the CBC’s Robert Weaver, producer of the long-running programme Anthology, one could not name. I suppose she had her reasons, but it’s not impossible that, in this case, she was, you know, wrong. Her aversion to the book on other fronts I could understand. The design is unfortunate, it must be said; an uglier piece of production would be hard to imagine. What on earth were they thinking? It shrieks out, “Buy me because I’ll be good for you, not because you’ll enjoy me.” Yeesh. In any case, I happened to have a spare, and I brought it along for A. who’d confided that she’d finished whatever Iris Murdoch novel her NYC neighbours had given her — Iris Murdoch, there’s a novelist who’s slipped out of currency — and needed something new to start.

Weather had been terrible all day, Friday, big squalls, flooding, but the rain had mercifully stopped as I was walking from home to the restaurant, and I didn’t have to avail myself of the Dollar Store collapsible umbrella I’d prophylactically acquired en route. Got to Nightingale first, ahead of A., sat down, immediately got all coy and stupid and ingratiating with the epicene young server, cute as a bug and utterly charming with his many tattoos and his chemically altered hair, a little bit Harpo Marx, and those earlobe-ruining inserts — there must be a name for them — I thought had had their day but I guess never went away or else are enjoying a revival. It might have been that he was going for an old-fashioned, retro look: retro, at least, for someone who can’t be older than 21, who was certainly born in this century, someone for whom 2014 would evoke nostalgia. He was adorable beyond telling, and I felt all avuncular in his presence, wanted to add his name to my will, to take him under my bony old wing, to give him advice, at least, to assist him in the cartography of the years to come, may they be many, and tell him what to do and not to do with the Brie, but instead I just went all Dorothy Parker at the Algonquin — one and I’m under the table, two and I’m under the host! — and ordered up a big old Bombay martini even though it was 2.25 of the afternoon. Directly he left I picked up what I thought to be an expertly and tightly folded and weirdly large napkin — the Nightingale is a foreign country, they do things differently there — and began to unfurl what proved to be the Dollar Store umbrella, which was not ideal. Looked about to see if I’d been observed. Yes. Much tittering from well-moisturized denizens of neighbouring tables into what were, in fact, napkins. Straightened my spine. Looked to my phone. “On my way!” said Aynsley, via text.

She arrived soon afterwards and we had a good, long visit. I’m her elder by about 15 years but for as long as I’ve known her I’ve always attributed to her qualities both maternal and nurturing. She just is that kind of person, and is as brilliant as she is caring, which is a rare combination of traits. She expressed concern over the hours I keep, the subtext being that they aren’t suitable for an elderly person — too many trinitarian multiples, 66 and up at 3.33, hunched over a hot word processor — and I’ll allow how she might have a point; I am not looking my best, il faut dire. That said, I’m also not persuaded that taking pains to prolong one’s life at this stage of the game is necessarily well-advised. If I had a grandchild whose graduation I wanted to attend, or who might stand a chance of starring in the high school production of Brigadoon I could see the point in taking care over lingering, but that is not the case and never will be. There comes a time when you look at the Brie and think, “Goddam but that nose looks tasty, I’m just going to bloody-well slice it off.”

Aynsley, too, was charmed by our server, taken by his decorative presentation, by his easy androgyneity; she asked me where I thought he was from. I placed his origins in one of the privileged enclaves of the city, guessed that he was engaged in a kind of I-won’t-go-to-Law-School rebellion, but she was persuaded he was from a small town and was living the life of which he’d dreamed since he was 13 and began to stake his claim to his true self. When we asked — I had given him permission to Taser me if I ordered another drink, so a kind of intimacy that enabled such an inquiry had been achieved — she proved to be the perspicacious one; it was ever thus. From a rural community. Northern B.C. Tried Calgary first. Hated it. Came to Vancouver. Clappy as a ham ever since. Bless his child heart. Long may it beat. One likes a happy hour that lives up to the promise of its name.

The evening prior, Thursday night, which was my Friday night, had wandered down to my local, The Buckstop, a barbecue joint on Denman Street, run by the smart and sassy and super hard-working Fiona Grieve, who is too young to be a den mother but nonetheless is, to me and any number of neighbourhood rogues. (I am drawn to younger women who are also mother figures, a tendency I ought to examine but won’t. I think I’ll have lots of time to explore that in my future nursing home, should I last that long, which is unlikely.) Buckstop is open late, the kitchen goes till 2, and it’s a popular industry hangout, lots of workers from the many restaurants nearby stop by for an after-work cocktail. I started going there in my dishwashing days, when I’d be all agitated by steam and carbolic inhalation and would be looking for post-midnight distraction. Sometimes, now, when I’m heading to work at 4.00 or 4.30 a.m., I’ll see Fiona, at the end of her shift, possibly even her rope, wiping down the counters. It’s at moments like those that this impossible, troubled city seems bearable, somehow, just by dint of this demonstration of its vital, vibrant underbelly, of all the small, unheralded, heroic motions that keep it alive, if struggling. Used to darken the Buckstop door a lot, not so much now, the early morning demands of middle management being what they are. Had a Thursday evening date, though, to meet one of my cronies, David R, a very good writer and an avid reader who’s been paying me the courtesy of keeping up with the MG diary. He’s well and widely read, much more so than I, and a new FOM, and has taken up the cause with the alacrity unique to new converts. He’d let me know that he’d acquired, from an online source, a second-hand — I mean, “previously loved” — copy of MG’s anthology The Other Paris. He hadn’t expected it to be signed and personalized, but it was; he thought I’d like to see it. Correct!

The photo was taken in the bar, lighting not ideal, hence the sepia smudginess here on view. MG would have been 74 by then, in September of 1996, and Gael Greene would have been a stripling of 62, assuming it’s the same Gael Greene who was for many years the food critic of New York Magazine, born December 22, 1933. She’s still active as near as I can determine which, when you do the math, is pretty remarkable. One wonders how they met, of course. Perhaps I’ll get in touch with Gael Greene — she looks to be selling accessories online, it might require that I buy a beaded clutch, one can never have too many — who might remember, find out if she has any light to shed. These diverting little investigations remind me of how, when we were kids, there was always someone on the block who had a blob of mercury — how? where did that toxic stuff come from? — and we’d delight in dropping it onto a surface, would love to watch it fracture and roll. I spend a lot of time now herding scattered fragments, not that it’s a hardship, I hasten to add.

My third bar experience of my two days off — here’s to you, St. Boniface, patron saint of brewers — was yesterday afternoon, Saturday, which is my Sunday. With boyfriend Billy P I went to the bar at the Sylvia Hotel — a legendary watering hole, popular with locals and tourists alike — to meet FOM Don Davis and his husband, Gerald, who had driven all the way in from distant and impossible-to-spell Tsawwassen — I hope I have that right, it makes one hanker for a triple word score — a not inconsiderable journey, especially when most of the city is a construction zone. Don got in touch about 10 days back when he’d noticed, in the diary, the photo I’d posted of MG’s signature + inscription in the copy of In Transit I’d borrowed from the Vancouver Public Library.

I’d remarked how there was LITERALLY NO CHANCE of finding out who this Don might be. I was — not for the first and not for the last time — really wrong. Don, the actual Don in question, the Don who came to the Sylvia, miraculously saw it, and realized the book had once been his, that he had sold it to another Don, Don Stewart of MacLeod’s Books. Plainly it had been purchased by a third party who may or may not be named Don, or Dawn, who then donated it to VPL. The primal Don contacted me to relate the story of meeting MG at a reading in Vancouver organized by Simon Fraser University. He spoke of how he’d attended the event, then lined up for her autograph, and conserved the Bic pen with which she’d signed. (Don, retired, is a dentist by training but an historian both by avocation and by present practice, and a preserving, archival instinct lives large within him: a good thing.) This precious token of that long-ago meeting, the Bic, he brought to the Sylvia yesterday afternoon and conferred upon me, and I was, and am, and will be, always, incredibly honoured. May I stress, for I know I can wax glib, that this is not ironic. I mean it, truly. It was in a government of Canada envelope, on which was inscribed the notation “Mavis’ pen,” as well as the date, May 10, 1989. The question was, of course, did the quill still work after all these years? We exhumed the Bic, gave it a whirl on the blank side of its tan manilla resting place.

It did that much, and that much only. Then, it gave up the ghost. It would have been nice, of course, if it had evolved into an episode of automatic writing, if MG had taken my hand and scrawled from the other side, “LEAVE ME ALONE,” or whatever. But it was only squiggles and then the minor furrows of a dried out nib on ageing paper. The object itself, however, is no less valuable minus its utility. I shall keep it in a special place, perhaps cause a shrine to be built around it.

Mavis’s pen, adjusting to its new and, avowedly, considerably reduced circumstances.

Don — he’s incredibly kind and thoughtful — also brought to the Sylvia some periodicals he thought might interest me — again, correct — including a mint condition Books in Canada, June-July 1978: so long ago I had not yet moved to Vancouver, was still working in Winnipeg, at the public library, the Centennial Branch, as then it was called, where this would surely have made its way, possibly via my own hand, to the periodical shelf.

I think that’s a fine slogan for this, MG’s centennial year. Can we at least all commit to doing that much? To stop being mean to MG? Maybe we can even take it up a notch, and sculpt a statue out of margarine or something. I’ve pretty much abandoned hope of getting her face on a stamp. I do, at least, have her name on an envelope.

By way of envoi on this Feast Day of St. Boniface, I leave you with this photo of the handsome Mr. Don Davis, the don of Dons, and a princely FOM. I hereby swear this to be an accurate likeness, taken yesterday, June 4, 2022, at 2.17 p.m., in the bar of the Sylvia Hotel, Vancouver. 14 hours and change later, it’s Sunday, 4.37 a.m. The birds are hard at it. The Don chorus. Gotta scoot, time for work. Thanks abounding to Aynsley, David R, Don and Gerald — who picked up the tab! Next one’s on me. And thanks to all of you, whoever and wherever you happen to be, for reading, xo, B

Don! .