The Rebel Angels

  “Envy of your learning and intellect?”

  “Yes.”

  “Perhaps that was part of it. Spite and envy are no less frequent behind the monastery wall than outside it, and you have an especially shameless mind that can’t disguise itself for the sake of people who are not so gifted. But what’s done is done. The question is, what do you do now?”

  “I’m doing a little teaching.”

  “In Continuing Studies.”

  “They’re humbling me.”

  “Lots of good people teach there.”

  “But God damn it to hell, Sim, I’m not just ‘good people’! I’m the best damned philosopher this University has ever produced and you know it.”

  “Perhaps. You are also a hard man to get along with, and to fit into anything. Have you any other prospects?”

  “Yes, but I need time.”

  “And money, I’ll bet.”

  “Could you see your way—?”

  “What do you want to do?”

  “I’m writing a book.”

  “What about? Scepticism used to be your special thing.”

  “No no; quite different. A novel.”

  “I don’t suppose you are counting on it to produce much money?”

  “Not for a while, of course.”

  “Better try for a Canada Council grant; they back novelists.”

  “Will you recommend me?”

  “I recommend quite a few people every year; but I’m not known for literary taste. How do you know you can write a novel?”

  “Because I have it all clear in my head! And it’s really extraordinary! A brilliant account of life as it used to be in this city—the underground life, that’s to say—but underlying it an analysis of the malaise of our time.”

  “Great God!”

  “Meaning what, precisely?”

  “Meaning that roughly two-thirds of the first novels that people write are on that theme. Very few of them get published.”

  “Don’t be so ugly! You know me; you remember the things I used to write when we were students. With my mind—”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of. Novels aren’t written with the mind.”

  “With what, then?”

  “Ask Ozy Froats; the forty-foot gut, he says. Look at you—a heavy mesomorphic element combined with substantial ectomorphy, but hardly any endomorphy at all. You’ve lived a terrible life, you’ve boozed and drugged and toughed around, and you’re still built like an athlete. I’ll bet you’ve got a miserable little gut. When did you last go to the w.c.?”

  “What the hell is all this?”

  “It’s the new psychology. Ask Froats.—Now I’ll make a deal with you, John—”

  “Just a few dollars to tide me over—”

  “All right, but I said a deal, and here it is. Stop wearing that outfit. You disgust me, parading around as a man in God’s service when you’re in no service but your own—or perhaps the Devil’s. I’ll give you a suit, and you’ve got to wear it, or no money and not one crumb of help from me.”

  We looked over my suits. I had in mind one that was becoming a little tight, but Parlabane, by what course of argument I can’t recall, walked off with one of my best ones—a smart clerical grey, though not of clerical cut. And a couple of very good shirts, and a couple of dark ties, and some socks, and a few handkerchiefs, and even an almost new pair of shoes.

  “You’ve certainly put on weight,” he said, as he preened in front of the mirror. “But I’m handy with the needle; I can take a reef or two in this.”

  At last he was going, so—sheer weakness—I gave him one drink.

  “How you’ve changed,” he said. “You know, you used to be a soft touch. We seem to have changed roles. You, the pious youth, have become as hard as nails: I, the unbeliever, have tried to become a priest. Has your faith been so eroded by your life?”

  “Strengthened, I should say.”

  “But when you recite the Creed, do you really mean what you say?”

  “Every word. But the change is that I also believe a great many other things that aren’t in the Creed. It’s shorthand, you know. Just what’s necessary. But I don’t live merely by what is necessary. If you are determined on the religious life, you have to toughen up your mind. You have to let it be a thoroughfare for all thoughts, and among them you must make choices. You remember what Goethe said—that he’d never heard of a crime he could not imagine himself committing? If you cling frantically to the good, how are you to find out what the good really is?”

  “I see.—Do you know anything about a girl called Theotoky?”

  “She’s a student of mine. Yes.”

  “I see something of her. She’s Hollier’s soror mystica, did you know? And as I’m his famulus—though he’s doing his damnedest to shake me—I see her quite often. A real scrotum-stirring beauty.”

  “I know nothing about that.”

  “But Hollier does, I think.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “I thought you might have heard something.”

  “Not a word.”

  “Well, I must go. Sorry you’ve become such a bad priest, Sim.”

  “Remember what I said about the habit.”

  “Oh, come on—just now and then. I like to lecture my mature students in it.”

  “Be careful. I could make things difficult for you.”

  “With the bishop? He wouldn’t care.”

  “Not with the bishop. With the R.C.M.P. You’ve got a record, remember.”

  “I bloody well have not!”

  “Not official. Just a few notes in a file, perhaps. But if I catch you in that fancy-dress again, I’ll grass on you, Brother John.”

  He opened his mouth, then shut it. He had learned something after all; he had learned not to have an answer for everything.

  He finished his drink, and after a longing look at the bottle, which I ignored, he went. But there was a pathetic appeal at the door which cost me fifty dollars. And he took his monk’s robe, bundled up and tied with its own girdle.

  Second Paradise

  4

  “Poshrat!”

  Mamusia struck me as hard as she could on the cheek with the flat of her hand. It was a rough blow, but perhaps I staggered a little more than was fully justified, and whimpered and appeared to be about to fall to the floor. She rushed toward me and pushed her face as near as possible to mine, hissing fury and garlic.

  “Poshrat!” she screamed again, and spat in my face. This was a scene we had played many times in our life together, my Mother and I, and I knew better than to try to wipe away the spittle. It was something that had to be endured, and in the end it would probably work out as I wished.

  “To tell him that! To chatter to your gadjo professor about the bomari! You hate me! You want to destroy me! Oh, I know how you despise me, how you are ashamed of me, how you want to ruin me! You grudge me the work by which I earn my poor living! You wish me dead! But do you think I have lived so long that I’m to be trampled and ruined by a poshrat slut, and my secrets torn away from me! I’ll kill you! I’ll come in the night and stab you as you sleep! Don’t glare at me with your bold eyes, or I’ll blind you with a needle! [I was not glaring, but this was a favourite threat.] Oh, that I should be cursed with you! The fine lady, the gadjo’s whore—that must be it—you’re his whore, are you? And you want to bring him here to spy on me! May the Baby Jesus tear you with a great iron hook!”

  On and on she raved, enjoying herself immensely; I knew that in the end she would rave herself into a good temper, and then there would be endearments, and a cold wet poultice of mint for my burning face, and a snort of Yerko’s fierce plum brandy, and she would play the bosh and sing to me and her affection would be as high-pitched as her wrath. Nothing for me to do but play my part, that of the broken, repentant daughter, supposedly living in the sunshine or shade of a Mother’s affection.

  Nobody could say my life lacked variety. At the University I was Miss Theotoky, a valued gradu
ate student somewhat above the rest because I was one of the select group of Research Assistants, a girl with friends and a quiet, secure place in the academic hierarchy, with professors who had marked me as one who might some day join their own Druid circle. At home I was Maria, one of the Kalderash, the Lovari, but not quite, because my Father had not been of this ancient and proud strain, but a gadjo—and therefore, when my Mother was displeased with me, she used the offensive word poshrat, which means half-breed. Everything that was wrong with me, in her eyes, came of being a poshrat. Nobody was to blame for this but herself, but it would not have been tactful to say so when she was angry.

  I was half Gypsy, and since my Father died the half sometimes seemed in my Mother’s estimation to amount to three-quarters, or even seven-eighths. I knew she loved me deeply, but like any deep love there were times when it was a burden, and its demands cruel. To live with my Mother meant living according to her beliefs, which were in almost every way at odds with what I had learned elsewhere. It had been different when my Father was alive, because he could control her, not by shouting or domination—that was her way—but by the extraordinary force of his noble character.

  He was a very great man, and since his death when I was sixteen I had been looking for him, or something like him, among all the men I met. I believe that psychiatrists explain such a search as mine to troubled girls as though it were a deep secret the girls could never have uncovered for themselves, but I had always known it; I wanted my Father, I wanted to find a man who was his equal in bravery and wisdom and warmth of love, and once or twice, briefly, I thought I had found him in Clement Hollier. Wisdom I knew he possessed; if it were called for I was sure he would have bravery; warmth of love was what I wanted to arouse in him, but I knew it would never do to thrust myself at him. I must serve; I must let my love be seen in humility and sacrifice; I must let him discover me. As indeed I thought he had, that April day on the sofa. I was not yet disappointed, but I was beginning to be just a little frenzied. When would he show himself the successor to my beloved Tadeusz, to my dear Father?

  Can I be a modern girl, if I acknowledge such thoughts? I must be modern: I live now. But like everybody else, as Hollier says, I live in a muddle of eras, and some of my ideas belong to today, and some to an ancient past, and some to periods of time that seem more relevant to my parents than to me. If I could sort them and control them I might know better where I stand, but when I most want to be contemporary the Past keeps pushing in, and when I long for the Past (like when I wish Tadeusz had not died, and were with me now to guide and explain and help me to find where I belong in life) the Present cannot be pushed away. When I hear girls I know longing to be what they call liberated, and when I hear others rejoicing in what they think of as liberation, I feel a fool, because I simply do not know where I stand.

  I know where I have been, however, or rather where the people from whom I derive all that I am, had their being and lived out vital portions of their fate. My Father, Tadeusz Bonawentura Niemcewicz, was Polish, and he had the misfortune to be born in Warsaw in 1910. Misfortune, I say, because a great war came soon afterward and his family, which had been well off, lost everything except a strong endowment of pride. He was a man of cultivation, and his profession was that of an engineer, leaning particularly toward the establishment and equipment of factories, and it was this work that took him while he was still young to Hungary, where he soon settled down as one of the Politowski who were numerous in Budapest. In consideration for his Hungarian friends, who thought Niemcewicz hard to pronounce, he added to it the name of his mother, which was Theotoky. She had been of Greek ancestry.

  He was a man of romantic temperament—or rather, I should say that is how I like to think of him—and like many such young men he fell in love with a Gypsy girl, but unlike most of the others, he married her. That was my Mother, Oraga Laoutaro.

  Not all Gypsies are nomads, and my Mother’s family had been musicians in Budapest for generations, because the Gypsy musicians would much rather play in comfortable restaurants, officers’ clubs, and the houses of rich people than wander the roads. Indeed, the Gypsy musicians think of themselves as the aristocracy of their people. My Mother was an oddity, because she played her violin in public; usually the Gypsy fiddlers are men, and the women sing and dance. She was beautiful and exciting, and the young Polish engineer pursued her and at last persuaded her to marry him, both in Gypsy form and in the Catholic Church.

  When the Second World War was approaching, my Father smelled it on the breeze, or more probably smelled it in the industrial work in which he was occupied. He determined to get out of Europe, and made arrangments which took so much time that he and my Mother barely made it to England before war broke out in the autumn of 1939. There they were joined by my Mother’s brother Yerko, who had been travelling in France—for reasons I shall tell in good time—and there they remained until 1946; my Father was in the Army, but not as a fighter; he designed equipment and planned its manufacture, and Yerko worked with him as an artificer, a maker of models. Tadeusz and my Mother had a child, but it died, and it was not until after they had come to Canada and settled in Toronto that I was born, in 1958, when my Mother was already near forty. (She always said she was born in 1920, but I don’t think she really knew, and certainly had nothing that would support it.) By that time my Father and Yerko were well set up in a business of their own, manufacturing equipment for hospitals; my Father knew how manufacturing should be managed, and Yerko, who was a brilliant metalsmith, could make and improve the working models of anything my Father could design. Everything seemed to move on a wave of success until my Father died in 1975, not dramatically of overwork but draggingly of a neglected cold which turned into other things and could not be defeated. And with my Father’s death our family, which had been pretty much, I suppose, like scores of other European families that had settled in Canada, a little foreign but not markedly at odds with the prevailing North American style of life, took a sharp turn from which it has not recovered.

  My Father was a strong character, and though he loved my Mother greatly, and loved to think of her as a Gypsy girl, it was clear that he wanted things in the family to go in the upper-class Polish way. My Mother dressed like a woman of means, and some good shops repressed her taste for gaudy colours and droopy silhouettes. She rarely spoke the Romany that was her cradle language, except to me and to Yerko, and her ordinary language with my Father was Hungarian; she learned a little Polish from him and I learned that language as well as I learned Hungarian; she was sometimes jealous that he and I could speak together in a tongue she did not follow perfectly. English she never learned perfectly, but in Toronto there were quite enough people for her to talk to in Hungarian for that not to be a severe handicap. In the company of English-speaking people she employed a broken English to which she managed to give a certain elegance—English-speaking people being pushovers for that kind of speech. Looking back over the years before my Father’s death, I realize now that Mamusia lived a somewhat muted, enclosed life. A beloved man had enveloped her, as now Hollier enveloped me.

  Mamusia was what my parents wanted me to call her—the appropriate pet-name of a well-bred Polish child for its Mother. Canadian children who heard me thought I was saying Mamoosha (Canadians are incorrigibly tin-eared) but the proper way to say the word is delicate and caressing. I also, on birthdays and at Christmas, called her Édesanya, which is high-class Hungarian, and I usually called my Father by the Hungarian form, which is Édesapa. When my Mother wanted to vex him, she would encourage me to call her Mamika—which is about equivalent to Mommix in English—and he would frown and click his tongue. He was never angry, but the tongue-clicking was rebuke enough for me.

  I think I was rather stiffly brought up, for Édesapa did not like the free-and-easy Canadian ways and could not see that they meant no disrespect. He was startled to discover that at the good convent school to which I was sent we were taught to play softball and lacrosse, and that the nuns
bundled up their skirts and played with us. Nuns on skates—which is a very pretty sight—troubled him dreadfully. Of course these were the old nuns, in skirts to their feet; the revolution in convent dress of the sixties almost persuaded him that the sky was falling. I know now that an aging romantic is hardly to be distinguished from an aging Tory, but as a loyal child I tried to share some of his sense of outrage. Not successfully. It was a black day when he learned that, like the other girls at the convent, I referred to the Mother Superior behind her back as The Old Supe.

  Poor Édesapa, so sweet, so courteous, so chivalrous but, even I must admit, so stuffy about some things. It was the nobility of spirit and the high ideals that won me and hold me still.

  How he made so much money, I do not know. Many people think that business and a fine concept of life cannot be reconciled, but I am not so sure. Make money he undoubtedly did, and when he died we were surprised to learn how much. Yerko could not have carried on alone, but he knew how to sell to advantage to a rival firm, and in the end there was a handsome trust to maintain Mamusia, and a handsome trust for me, and Yerko was quite a rich man. Of course everybody has his own idea about what it is to be rich; truly rich people, I suppose, don’t really know what they have. But Yerko was rich beyond anything that a Hungarian Gypsy musician would have thought possible, and he wept copiously and assured me that it would all come to me when he died, and that he felt the hand of death on him very frequently. He was only fifty-eight and as strong as a horse, and lived a life that would have killed any ordinary man years ago, but he spoke of death as something to be expected hourly.

  The root of much trouble was that I was to get the whole of the money that was in trust for me when I became twenty-five, and would receive all the capital of Mamusia’s trust when she died. It appeared to her—and no amount of explanation or reasoning on my part or that of the puzzled men at the Trust Company’s offices could persuade her otherwise—that I had scooped the pile, that her adored Tadeusz had somehow done the dirty on her, and that she was close to destitution. Where was her money? Why was she never able to lay hands on it? She received a substantial monthly cheque, but who was to say when that might not be cut off? In her heart she knew well enough what was what, but she delighted in making a Gypsy row in order to see the Trust men blench and swallow their spittle as she raved.