Grief, Memory, Three O'Clock in the Morning: My Mavis Gallant Centennial Diary, June 19

Death and Silence Can be One / Father's Day is Fun, Fun, Fun

3.03 a.m. It was at this time of year, in the latter days of June, 2014, the annual allotment of light at its apex, that it became clear my father, Stan, was trimming his sails in earnest, and would soon cast off. The last time we were able to have a conversation that approximated the linear was in the hallway of his extended care facility, the usual chaos going on all around us — so many people with all their filters disabled — and for some reason it was important for him to remember Poe’s “The Raven,” a perennial favourite amongst his many party pieces.

“Once upon a midnight dreary while I pondered ….. Once upon a midnight dreary while, while I pon - , while …. Once upon a midnight dreary while I pondered weak and … weak and … weak… Oh shit. I give up.”

A few days later, definitively, he did.

During the long last night of his life on Earth I sat in his room and listened to his breathing slow, grow ragged, stop, then rally. I’d spent many a morning, afternoon, and early evening there, but never a night. It was settled and calm in that place that was usually so vibrant with the assertion of needs that often couldn’t be answered, or even understood. Now and then the night nurse — she was lovely beyond telling, gentle, intuitive, reassuring — would check in. She would say, “Soon,” and show me how the colouring of his legs had started to change, the flesh demonstrating the corruptibility to which it’s heir. A thermometer registering a rising coolness. Death by inches. She had seen this so many times before, of course, and I was glad to have her as a guide. It felt natural, necessary, irresistible: a simple truce it made sense to sign. Peace was upon us. Stan seemed sometimes to labour, but he had worked hard his whole life. Of this last push, he was capable. I was a bit restless, truth be told. I chose the diversion of dealing with some practicalities that might be hours, might be minutes away from becoming a facility-mandated imperative. Someone else was out there, waiting for his room. Some other family had made decisions about what tokens of a life lived to put in the memory box outside the door. I found a few boxes — small ones, there wasn’t much anyone would want to keep — and some garbage bags for the rest. Books he’d never read. The journal someone gave him to make notes of important things to remember, in which, in the first page, he’d written, “I.” It was otherwise blank. I sorted through his clothes, tried on his beloved Tilley, amply decorated with the commemorative pins of which he’d gathered an amazing plenitude, given that he didn’t much care to attend the kinds of gatherings where such things would be disbursed. The tree, the apple. It looked better on him, for sure.

My brother came at 5. I drove home to walk my dogs, returned at 6. Stan, considerate to the end, had managed to hold on. At 7.07, he died. I think of him every day, and miss him. He was an honourable man, honest, talented, reticent, modest. And funny. So funny. He never cared much, not at all, about Father’s Day or the other Hallmark occasions, nor do I. But the day is the day, and so I remember him here, for the record, and offer, because I know how much it will cheer you all up, these patriarch-centred quotations, a dozen all told, culled from various writings by Mavis Gallant, the sources noted in boldface. The word “father” appears in her Selected Stories 547 times; mother, 749. This particular posy, representative, has about it the whiff of a bouquet gathered shamelessly by someone on a cemetery visit. Say it with flowers, dude. Thanks for reading, xo, B

1. My father’s death had been kept from me. I did not know its exact circumstances or even the date. He died when I was ten. At thirteen I was still expected to believe a fable about his being in England. I kept waiting for him to send for me, for my life had been deeply wretched and I took it for granted he knew. Finally I began to suspect that death and silence can be one. — In Youth is Pleasure

2. All the French Canadian fathers in town worked. They delivered milk, they farmed, they owned rival hardware stores, they drew up one another’s wills. Nor were they the only busy ones. Across the river, in a faithful reproduction of a suburb of Glasgow or Manchester, lived a small colony of English-speaking summer residents from Montreal. Their children were called Al, Lily, Winnie, or Mac, and they were distinguished by their popping blue eyes, their excessive devotion to the Royal Family, and their contempt for anything even vaguely queer or Gallic. Like the French Canadians, the fathers of Lily and Winnie and the others worked. Every one of them had a job. When they were not taking the train to Montreal to attend to their jobs, they were crouched in their gardens, caps on their heads, tying up tomato plants or painting stones to make gay multicoloured borders for nasturtium beds. Saturday night, they trooped into the town bar-and-grill and drank as much Molson’s ale as could be poured into the stomach before closing time. Then, awash with ale and nostalgia, they sang about the maid in the clogs and shawl, and something else that went, ‘Let’s all go down to the strand and have a ba-na-ar-na.’” — Wing’s Chips

3. “Bernadette, I want to help you. Sit down. Tell me, are you pregnant?”

“I don’t understand.”

“You do. Un enfant. Un bébé. Am I right?”

“Sais pas,” said Bernadette. She looked at the clock over Nora’s head.

“Bernadette.”

It was getting late. Bernadette said, “Yes, I think so. Yes.” …

“Who is the boy?”

“Un monsieur,” said Bernadette.

Did she mean by that an older man, or was Bernadette, in using the word “monsieur,” implying a social category? … Nora repeated, “Un monsieur.” An unfounded and wholly outrageous idea rushed into her mind. Dismissing it, she said, “When did it happen?”

“Sais pas.”

“Don’t be silly. That really is a very silly reply. Of course you know. You’ve only had certain hours out of this house.”

The truth of it was that Bernadette did not know. She didn’t know his name or whether he was married or even where she could find him again, even if she had desired such a thing. He seemed the least essential factor. — Bernadette

4. Nothing she had wanted to know, either about her sudden fear or her sudden cruelty … had been explained in her father’s poems. The sound of the lodger stealthily closing doors, the dwindling thunder, the whisper of traffic as she approached the rue de Rivoli — these indications that she could at least hear — were no help to her; they were fugitive, suggestive sounds, like the clues to her father’s past. They were as close, and as evocative, and as general as his early life with their mother, or his life with someone else. Other people moved behind walls of gossip. Dorothy could look at pictures; she could read George’s diaries, for he had let them be printed. It was hard to believe he had ever had a secret. He told of lying in bed with a sister-in-law while his wife lay with a newly born son in a nursing home not far away. Dorothy could have questioned anyone, even the lodger; George would never have thought it a betrayal. Hie lied only sometimes, suiting a fancy. — The Statues Taken Down

5. Oh, he was so foolish with the child! Like a servant, like a humble tutor with a crown prince. She would never marry Herbert — never. Not unless he placed the child in the strictest of boarding schools, for little Bert’s own sake. Was it fair to the child, was it honest to bring him up without discipline, without religion, without respect, belief, or faith? Wasn’t it simply Herbert’s own self-indulgence, something connected with his past? It happened that little Bert’s mother had run away. Not only did Herbert-the-amiable forgive his wife, but he sent her money whenever she needed it. In a sense he was paying her to stay away from little Bert. He’d had bad luck with his women. — The Pegnitz Junction

6. In the south of France, in the business room of a hotel quite near to the house where Katherine Mansfield (whom no one in this hotel had ever heard of) was writing “The Daughters of the Late Colonel,” Netta Asher’s father announced that there would never be a man-made catastrophe in Europe again. The dead of that recent war, the doomed nonsense of the Russian Bolsheviks had finally knocked some sense into European heads. What people wanted now was to get on with life. When he said ‘life,’ he meant its commercial business.

Who would have contradicted Mr. Asher? Certainly not Netta. She did not understand what he meant quite so well as his French solicitor seemed to, but she did listen with interest and respect, and then watched him signing the papers that, she knew, concerned her for life. He was renewing the long lease her family held on the Hotel Prince Albert and Albion. Netta was then eleven. One hundred years should at least see her through the prime of life, said Mr. Asher, only half jokingly, for of course he thought his seed was immortal.

Netta supposed she might easily live to be more than a hundred — at any rate, for years and years. She knew that her father did not want her to marry until she was twenty-six and that she was then supposed to have a pair of children, the elder a boy. Netta and her father and the French lawyer shook hands on the lease, and she was given her first glass of champagne. The date on the bottle was 1909, for the year of her birth. Netta bravely pronounced the wine delicious, but her father said she would know much better vintages before she was through. — The Moslem Wife

7. He’d had a father, of course — had him until he was eighteen, even though it was Raymond’s practice to grumble that he had been raised badly, by women. His last memories of his father must surely have been Louis dying of emphysema, upright in the white-painted wicker chair, in blazing forbidden sunlight, mangling a forbidden cigar. The partially flagged backyard had no shade in it — just two yellow fringed umbrellas that filtered the blue of July and made it bilious. Louis could not sit in their bogus shadow, said it made him sweat. Behind the umbrellas was the kitchen entrance to a duplex dwelling of stucco and brick, late 1940’s in style — a cube with varnished doors — at the northern end of the Boulevard Pie IX. “Remember that your father owned this house,” said Lous; also, “When we first moved up here you could see vacant lots. It depressed your mother. She wasn’t used to open views.” …

The silent intermissions, his gaze upturned, made it seem as if Louis were seeking divine assistance. Actually, he knew everything he wished to say. So did Raymond. Raymond — even his aunt will not deny it — showed respect. He never once remarked, “I’ve heard this before,” or uttered the timeless, frantic snub of the young, “I know, I know, I know.”

His father said, “There have always been good jobs in Boston,” “Never forget your French, because it would break your mother’s heart,” “One of these days you’re going to have to cut your hair,” “Marry a Catholic, but not just any Catholic,” “With a name like Raymond Joseph Driscoll you can go anywhere in the world,” “That autograph album of mine is worth a fortune. Hang onto it. It will always get you out of a tight spot.” — From Cloud to Cloud

8. The institution of the remittance man was British, its genesis a chemical structure of family pride, class insanity, and imperial holdings that seemed impervious to fission but in the end turned out to be more fragile than anyone thought. Like all superfluous and marginal persons, remittance men where characters in a plot. The plot began with a fixed scene, an immutable first chapter, which described a powerful father’s taking umbrage at his son’s misconduct and ordering him out of the country. The pound was then one to five dollars, and there were vast British territories everywhere you looked. Hordes of young men who had somehow offended their parents were shipped out, golden deportees, to Canada, South Africa, New Zealand, Singapore. They were reluctant pioneers, totally lacking any sense of adventure or desire to see that particular world. An income — the remittance — was provided on a standing banker’s order, with one string attached: “Keep out of England.” For the second chapter the plot allowed a choice of six crimes as reasons for banishment: Conflict over the choice of profession — the son wants to be a tap dancer. Gambling and debts — he has been barred from Monte Carlo. Dud checks — “I won’t press a charge, sir, but see that the young rascal is kept out of harm’s way.” Marriage with a girl from the wrong walk of life — “Young man, you have made your bed!” Fathering an illegitimate child: “… and broken your mother’s heart.” Homosexuality, if discovered: Too grave for even a lecture — it was a criminal offence. …

Even at nineteen the plot was a story I wouldn’t buy. The truth came down to something just as dramatic but boring to tell: a classic struggle for dominance with two protagonists — strong father, pliant son. It was also a male battle. No son was ever sent into exile by his mother, and no one has ever heard of a remittance woman. — Varieties of Exile

9. The children had never been in a house this size. They chased each other and slid along the floors until Alec asked, politely, if they wouldn’t mind playing outside, although one of the reasons he had wanted to come here was to be with them for the time remaining. …

The sun Alec had wanted turned out to be without compassion, and he spent most of the day indoors, moving from room to room, searching for some gray, dim English cave in which to take cover. Often he sat without reading, doing nothing, in a room whose one window, none too clean, looked straight into the blank hill behind the house. Seepage and a residue of winter rainstorms had traced calm yellowed patterns on its walls. He guessed it had once been assigned to someone’s hapless, helpless paid companion, who would have marvelled at the thought of its lending shelter to a dying man. In the late afternoon he would return to his bedroom where, out on the balcony, an angular roof shadow slowly replaced the sun. Barbara unfolded his deck chair on the still burning tiles. He stretched out, opened a book, found the page he wanted, at once closed his eyes. Barbara knelt in a corner, in a triangle of light. She had taken her clothes off, all but a sunhat; bougainvillea grew so thick no one could see. She said, “Would you like me to read to you?” No; he did everything alone, or nearly. He was — always — bathed, shaved, combed, and dressed. His children would not remember him unkempt or disheveled, though it might not have mattered to them. He did not smell of sweat or sickness or medicine or fear. — The Remission

10. It was our father who ran, actually. He deserted us during the last war. He joined the Queen’s Own Rifles, which wasn’t a Montreal regiment — he couldn’t do anything like other people, couldn’t even join up like anyone else — and after the war he just chose to go his own way. I saw him downtown in Montreal one time after the war. I was around twelve, delivering prescriptions for a drugstore. I knew him before he knew me. He looked the way he had always managed to look, as if he had all the time in the world. His mouth was drawn in, like an old woman’s, but he still had his coal black hair. I wish we had his looks. I leaned my bike with one foot on the curb and he came down and stood by me, rocking on his feet, like a dancer, and looking off over my head. He said he was a night watchman at a bank and that he was waiting for the Army to fix him up with some teeth. He’d had all his teeth out, though there wasn’t anything wrong with them. He was eligible for new ones, provided he put in a claim that year, so he thought he might as well. He was a bartender by profession, but he wasn't applying for anything till he’d got his new teeth. “I’ve told them to hurry it up,” he said. “I can’t go around to good places all gummy.” He didn’t ask how anyone was at home.

I had to leave Canada to be with my father when he died. I was the person they sent for, though I was the youngest. My name was on the back page of his passport: “In case of accident of death notify William Apostolesco. Relationship: Son.” — The End of the World

11. His father had arrived from New York. He was a mild old man, who had not wanted this marriage. He seemed to take up no space in the apartment, and he made everyone generous gifts. Bonnie tried to charm him, and failed. She tried to treat him like a joint parent, with foolish young people to consider, but that failed too. She gave up. She felt that disapproval of the match should be her own family’s prerogative, and that the Harrises were overstepping. The old man saw Flor, her silence, her absence, and believed she had a lover and that her pallor was owing to guilty thoughts. The young people had been married two years: it seemed to him a sad and wretched affair. There were no children and no talk of any. He thought, I warned him, but he held still: he did not want to cause the estrangement of his only son. His gentle sadness affected them all. He was thinly polite and looked unwell. His skin had the bluish clarity of skimmed milk. Bonnie wanted to scream at him: I didn’t want your son! She wondered why he felt he had to be so damned courtly. In her mind there was no social gap between a Jewish wine merchant and her ex-husband’s old bootlegger of thirty years before. — Green Sky, Green Water

12.

— Paris Diary, 1992, published in The New Yorker, December 24 / 31, 2001