Had she ever been called a Dirty Jew?
They fell silent and the nurses and their blond babies reasserted their control of the universe.
And what was it like to have no father?
It made you more grown-up. You carved the chicken, you sat where he sat.
Lisa listened, and Breavman, for the first time, felt himself dignified, or rather, dramatized. His father’s death gave him a touch of mystery, contact with the unknown. He could speak with extra authority on God and Hell.
The nurses gathered their children and their boats and went away. The surface of the pond became smooth. The hands of the clock on the Chalet wound towards supper-time, but they kept on talking.
They squeezed hands, kissed once when the light was low enough, coming golden through the prickly bushes. Then they walked slowly home, not holding hands, but bumping against each other.
Breavman sat at the table trying to understand why he wasn’t hungry. His mother extolled the lamb chops.
16
Whenever they could they played their great game, the Soldier and the Whore. They played it in whatever room they could. He was on leave from the front and she was a whore of DeBullion Street.
Knock, knock, the door opened slowly.
They shook hands and he tickled her palm with his forefinger.
Thus they participated in that mysterious activity the accuracies of which the adults keep so coyly hidden with French words, with Yiddish words, with spelled-out words; that veiled ritual about which night-club comedians construct their humour; that unapproachable knowledge which grownups guard to guarantee their authority.
Their game forbade talking dirty or roughhouse. They had no knowledge of the sordid aspect of brothels, and who knows if there is one? They thought of them as some sort of pleasure palace, places denied them as arbitrarily as Montreal movie theatres.
Whores were ideal women just as soldiers were ideal men.
“Pay me now?”
“Here’s all my money, beautiful baby.”
17
Seven to eleven is a huge chunk of life, full of dulling and forgetting. It is fabled that we slowly lose the gift of speech with animals, that birds no longer visit our windowsills to converse. As our eyes grow accustomed to sight they armour themselves against wonder. Flowers once the size of pine trees, return to clay pots. Even terror diminishes. The giants and giantesses of the nursery shrink to crabby teachers and human fathers. Breavman forgot everything he learned from Lisa’s small body.
Oh, how their lives had emptied from the time they crawled out from under the bed and stood up on their hind legs!
Now they longed for knowledge but undressing was a sin. Therefore they were an easy touch for the postcards, pornographic magazines, home-made erotica peddled in school cloakrooms. They became connoisseurs of sculpture and painting. They knew all the books in the library which had the best, most revealing reproductions.
What did bodies look like?
Lisa’s mother presented her with a careful book and they searched it in vain for straight information. There were phrases like “the temple of the human body,” which may be true, but where was it, with its hair and creases? They wanted clear pictures, not a blank page with a dot in the centre and a breathless caption: “Just think! the male sperm is 1,000 times smaller than this.”
So they wore light clothing. He had a pair of green shorts which she loved for their thinness. She had a yellow dress which he preferred. This situation gave birth to Lisa’s great lyric exclamation:
“You wear your green silk pants tomorrow; I’ll wear my yellow dress, so it’ll be better.”
Deprivation is the mother of poetry.
He was about to send for a volume advertised in a confession magazine which promised to arrive in a plain, brown wrapper, when, in one of the periodic searches through the maid’s drawers, he found the viewer.
It was made in France and contained a two-foot strip of film. You held it to the light and turned the little round knob and you saw everything.
Let us praise this film, which has disappeared with the maid into the Canadian wilderness.
It was titled in English, with beguiling simplicity, “Thirty Ways to Screw.” The scenes were nothing like the pornographic movies Breavman later witnessed and attacked, of naked, jumpy men and women acting out the contrived, sordid plots.
The actors were handsome humans, happy in their film career. They were not the scrawny, guilty, desperately gay cast-offs who perform for gentlemen’s smokers. There were no lecherous smiles for the camera, no winking and lip-licking, no abuse of the female organ with cigarettes and beer bottles, no ingenious unnatural arrangement of bodies.
Each frame glowed with tenderness and passionate delight.
This tiny strip of celluloid shown widely in Canadian theatres might revitalize the tedious marriages which are reported to abound in our country.
Where are you, working girl with supreme device? The National Film Board hath need of you. Are you growing old in Winnipeg?
The film ended with a demonstration of the grand, democratic, universal practice of physical love. There were Indian couples represented, Chinese, Negro, Arabian, all without their national costumes on.
Come back, maid, strike a blow for World Federalism.
They pointed the viewer to the window and solemnly traded it back and forth.
They knew it would be like this.
The window gave over the slope of Murray Park, across the commercial city, down to the Saint Lawrence, American mountains in the distance. When it wasn’t his turn Breavman took in the prospect. Why was anybody working?
They were two children hugging in a window, breathless with wisdom.
They could not rush to it then and there. They weren’t safe from intrusion. Not only that, children have a highly developed sense of ritual and formality. This was important. They had to decide whether they were in love. Because if there was one thing the pictures showed, you had
