Memory, Grief, Three O'clock in the Morning: My Mavis Gallant Centennial Diary, 31

Codas of overtones, ecstasies

May 21, 3.13 a.m.

This morning a constructed conversation with Mavis Gallant (MG). It’s a “colloque sentimental,”(1) a Victoria Day long weekend collage of words and music: a show you can hear in your own good time on the radio of your own good mind. It is ART, dammit. ART. Which doesn’t mean you can’t turn it on and off at will. I’m all for art until it gets in the way of a picnic. Happy Saturday.

“I took it for granted that life was tough for children and adults had a good time. My parents enjoyed themselves, or seemed to. If I want to bring back a Saturday night in full summer, couples dancing on the front gallery (Quebec English for verandah), a wind-up gramophone and a stack of brittle records, all I need to hear is the beginning of ‘West End Blues.’” Mavis Gallant (MG), Introduction, Collected Stories

Saturdays, Winnipeg, circa 1967. Mornings, my father would go to a neighbourhood bakery to get the loaves for the coming week - unsliced white - as well as the sticky buns — pecans, cherries, a sickly sweet, treacly, tacky toffee or caramel glaze — that we had with tea — hot the pot, leave to steep, strong, black, milk in your tea is milk in your blood — at 4 o’clock, on the dot. None of us had been to England but we might as well have lived there, those ancestral traditions were so inbred. (What was the name of the bakery? Gone from me. Not even on the tip of my tongue.) That we ingested all those carbs and then had some big dinner 2 hours later — almost always a pasta on Saturdays — makes me wonder why we were never apprehended and fostered out by whatever agency then enforced the Canada Food Guide. At 10 a.m., Saturday after Saturday, my father would leave the house and go to the bakery and always, ritualistically, as he opened the door, he’d turn, pause, make sure his audience was attentive — we were, we were waiting — and say, “Goodbye, now. I’m off to get bread.”

“Bread” is what he said, but “bred” was intended. Oh, golly. Weekend after weekend, as reliable as Saturday itself. It never got old. Evergreen. To reach the point where you could distinguish “bread” from “bred” was a portal moment, a passage from childhood to whatever waited around the dangerous corner. It was like that moment when you could laugh, knowingly, at the more risque moments on Laugh-In, or the Smothers Brothers. I’m off to get — it doesn’t translate well to the page. How do you write it? I’m off to get bre(a)d? It doesn’t matter. God, what a card. I miss him. I miss how we all rolled around, laughing, time after time. Without fail.

“Grandmother Abbott had curly hair, a striking shade of white, and a pink face. She wore quite nice shoes but had been forced to cut slits in them to accommodate her sore toes. Her apron strings could barely be tied, her waist was that thick around. She said to Gerry, ‘You take after your grandpa’s side,’ because of the red-gold hair. The girls did not yet read English, so she deduced they did not read at all. She told them how John Wesley and his brothers and sisters had each learned the alphabet on the day they turned five. It was achieved by dint of being shut in a room with Mrs. Wesley, and receiving nothing to eat or drink until the recitation ran smoothly from A to Z.

‘That’s a Methodist birthday for you,” said Ray. It may have stirred up memories, for he become snappy and critical, as he never was at home. He stood up for Quebec, saying there was a lot of good in a place where a man could have a beer whenever he felt like it and no questions asked. In Quebec, you could buy beer in grocery stories. The rest of Canada was pretty dry, yet in those parched cities, on a Saturday night, even the telephone poles were reeling-drunk.” (MG, The Fenton Child)

We were United Church, amply marbled with the Wesleyan Methodist traditions that had been folded into that uniquely Canadian compromise of a hybrid. I was 16 before I was allowed to go to the movies on a Sunday, which privilege was not then accorded like a learner’s permit because I’d entered a new stage of maturity, but merely because the parental enforcement of so irrational and arbitrary a rule became wearying and impractical. It wasn’t as though the time spent NOT attending the movies was given over to standing around the pump organ and harmonizing “How Great Thou Art.” Life went on as it always did. The habits of the adults, those entitled hypocrites, never changed to reflect the requirement of the Sabbath. Cigarettes were smoked. Alcohol was imbibed. The “no movies” rule was simply a way of exercising authority, a control mechanism. It was transparently so, was indefensible; nor did it need defending. It was an extension of the “because I said so” gambit that shut down any prolonged argument, and that was so much a part of our earlier childhoods. Along with “Do as I say and not as I do.”

The library was permitted on the Sabbath, a place of greater potential harm than any cinema. The only library in the Winnipeg public system open on a Sunday was the Central Library, on William Street. I could go there by bike in the summer, bus otherwise. On William Street — it was a Carnegie Library, a beautiful building, formal, neoclassical, built in temple style — you could browse the really excellent recordings collection. That was where one of my enduring love affairs began, was where I first found and borrowed and listened, obsessively, to Stephen Sondheim, first Company, and then A Little Night Music, with this brilliant sextet, the paean to the weekend and all it promises, pleasures and pitfalls. It’s wonderfully grownup, and I think it holds its own against the ensembles by Donizetti or Mozart that are its forebears and inspiration.

“The municipal library was considered a sinister joke. There was a persistent, apocryphal story among English Canadians that an American philanthropic foundation (the Carnegie was usually mentioned) had offered to establish a free public lending library on condition that its contents were not to be censored by the provincial government of Quebec or by the Catholic Church, and that the offer had been turned down. The story may not have been true but its persistence shows the political and cultural climate of Montreal then. Educated French Canadians summed it up in shorter form: their story was that when you looked up ‘Darwin’ in the card index of the Bibliotheque de Montreal, you found ‘See anti-Darwin.’” (MG, Between One and Zero)

I remember childhood Saturdays in general, remember the big arc of the day, but if you were to ask me to describe something specific that belonged to one Saturday only — and why would you do that? — this would be all that comes to mind. I was taking piano lessons, was singularly ungifted, but had asked for them, for reasons now unclear, and my parents complied. My teacher was a woman with whom they were acquainted, in a several times removed kind of way. I don’t remember her name or the connection, she may have been married to someone who belonged to my father’s men’s group, The Fellowship Club. They lived across town. The lessons were scheduled for Saturday morning. Stan would drive me there, drop me off, go off to get bre(a)d, then pick me up. I didn’t enjoy these sessions. I wan’t any good, would never be any good, and that was bad enough, but worse was that there was something just plain old wrong in the house, you could feel it, a sadness, a heaviness in the atmosphere. My teacher looked pre-occupied, worried; she smoked while I clunked through my pieces, Golem-like, and didn’t have much to say about them. She was disengaged, remote. Were she not someone with whom there was a family connection, however remote, I don’t think I would have lasted as long as I did; that, as it turns out, was not very long. One Saturday we arrived — this was perhaps our seventh or eighth meeting — and rang the bell. Her husband answered. I remember he was unshaven, was in his undershirt, dishevelled, not ready for company. He looked at us, uncomprehending. We were not expected. He said, “She never told you?” Stan stepped inside. I went back to the car, sat, waited. In the house, there was a man to man. Stan returned, started the car. We drove home. I can’t remember if there was a stop at the bakery. I asked what had happened, what had become of Mrs. X, what it was that she ought to have told but that she never told, but he artfully deflected all questions. I remember he had a sotto voce conversation with my mother when we got home; remember her eyebrows arching, the “Ohhhh,” look on her face. I knew not to inquire further, but wasn’t irredeemably thick, was worldly enough to understand that it came down to this: Mrs. X had bolted. I was curious to know why, but — I’m ashamed to admit it — I was also relieved. The minor torture of those Saturday lessons was over. All that remained is what remains: the part of a mystery that hides from the light.

“It was my father’s custom if he took me with him to visit a friend on Saturdays not to say where we were going. He was more taciturn than any man I have known since, but that wasn’t all of it; being young, I was the last person to whom anyone owed an explanation. These Saturdays have turned into one whitish afternoon, a windless snowfall, a steep street. Two persons descend the street, stepping carefully. The child, reminded every day to keep her hands still, gesticulates wildly — there is the flat of a red mitten. I will never overtake this pair. Their voices are lost in snow.”

And that is sweet and timely Amen. Time’s up. Work waits! I’m a salary man! I’m off to get bread. Thanks for reading / listening. xo, B

P.S. Please note the inclusion of the following footnote, a sure indication that I am a serious person.

(1) Edith Sitwell’s “By the Lake,” from Facade, music by William Walton, is an adaptation / translation of Verlaine’s “Colloque Sentimental,” with a bit of Rimbaud (j’ai tendu des cordes de clocher a clocher) thrown in just to keep things lively and everyone on their toes. For those who want to compare and contrast, here’s the Verlaine text:

Dans le vieux parc solitaire et glacé
Deux formes ont tout à l'heure passé.

Leurs yeux sont morts et leurs lèvres sont molles,
Et l'on entend à peine leurs paroles.

Dans le vieux parc solitaire et glacé
Deux spectres ont évoqué le passé.

- Te souvient-il de notre extase ancienne?
- Pourquoi voulez-vous donc qu'il m'en souvienne?

- Ton coeur bat-il toujours à mon seul nom?
Toujours vois-tu mon âme en rêve? - Non.

Ah ! les beaux jours de bonheur indicible
Où nous joignions nos bouches ! - C'est possible.

- Qu'il était bleu, le ciel, et grand, l'espoir !
- L'espoir a fui, vaincu, vers le ciel noir.

Tels ils marchaient dans les avoines folles,
Et la nuit seule entendit leurs paroles.