Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You

up in ironed points. My hair in ringlets, put in with a comb dipped in water, not a style favored by anybody else. But what could I have worn that would have been right? Once I got a new winter coat, which I thought lovely. It had a squirrel collar. Rat fur, rat fur, skinned a rat and wore the fur! they called after me. After that I didn’t like the fur, didn’t like the touch of it; something too soft about it, private, humiliating.
    I used to look for places to hide. In buildings, in big public buildings I looked for little high windows, dark places. The old Bank of Commerce building had a tower I was fond of. I imagined myself hiding there, or in any small high-up room, safe in the middle of town, disregarded, forgotten. Except that somebody could come at night and bring me food.

    It was true about my father. But he was usually away, taking a cure, resting in a sanatorium, traveling. Before I was born he had been a Member of Parliament. He suffered a great defeat in 1911, the year Laurier went out. Much later, when I learned about Reciprocity, I discovered that this defeat had been only a corner of a national calamity (if indeed you were inclined to see it as a calamity), but when I was a child I always believed that my father had been personally, tauntingly, shamefully rejected. My mother likened the event to the Crucifixion. He had come out on the balcony of the Queen’s Hotel, to speak, to concede his defeat, and was prevented, jeered down, by Tories carrying brooms on fire. I had no idea, hearing this, that such were the scenes politicians sometimes have to face. My mother dated his downfall from this time. Though she did not specify what form the downfall took. Alcoholic was not a word spoken in our house; I don’t believe it was spoken much anywhere, at that time. Drunk was the word used, but that was in the town.
    My mother would no longer shop in this town, except for groceries, which she had Robina order by phone. She would not speak to various ladies, wives of taunters and Tories.
    I will never darken their door .
    That was what she would say about a church, a store, somebody’s house.
    “He was too fine for them.”
    She had nobody but Robina to say these things to. But Robina was satisfactory, in a way. She was a person with her own list of people not to be spoken to, stores not to be entered.
    “They’re all ignorant around here. It’s them ought to be swept out with a broom.”
    And she would start telling about some injustice done to her brothers Jimmy and Duval, accused of stealing when they were only trying to see how a flashlight worked.

    Past the buildings in town I had to walk a mile on a straight country road. Our house was at the end of it, a big brick house with bay windows upstairs and down. They always looked unpleasant to me, swollen out like insects’ eyes. I was glad when they tore that house down, years later; they turned our land into the Municipal Airport. Along the road there were only two or three other houses. One of them was Stump Troy’s.
    Stump Troy was a bootlegger, who had lost his legs in an accident at Ryan’s Mill. It was said that the Ryan family supported his bootlegging and kept him out of trouble, so that he would not bring a lawsuit against them. Certainly he flourished as a bootlegger and was never interfered with by anybody. He had a son Howard, who came to school now and then—no knowing by whose whim—and was put in whatever class had room for him, seated at the back with empty seats around him if possible so that no mother could complain. No truant officer, if there was such a thing as a truant officer then, can have bothered with this case. In those days it was expected, even necessary, that people should stay as they were and not be improved or changed. Teachers would make jokes about Howard Troy in his presence and absence, and it was never thought odd or cruel. Beyond that they let him alone.
    During one of his sessions at school he was in our class, sitting diagonally behind me, and I did him a favor, which afterwards and even at the time I knew to be a mistake. We were copying from the board. Howard Troy was not copying. He was sitting without a pencil or a paper, doing nothing at all. He came to school without any equipment. Carrying pencils, paper, erasers, crayons, would have been as unlikely for him as growing feathers. He was looking straight ahead, maybe looking at the board trying to read or make sense of what was written there, maybe