The Diviners

  Memorybank Movie: Higher Learning–The Lowdown

  A year older than almost everyone in her class–this does make a difference. There are four men who are even older, returned veterans, but they are all married. Or does the difference reside more in the fact that so many of these kids went to High School together in the city? Or is it Morag’s own goddamn fault, being both proud and humiliatingly shy? Thinking she looks gawky, not knowing half the time whether other people are kidding or not.

  The others flow in and out of classrooms and cafeteria, and she does, too. Usually by herself. So what? This is what she’s wanted, to be here, and now she’s here.

  The late September dust fills the city streets, and the prairie maples are yellow, leaves blowing against her face as she walks to the streetcar stop. Manawaka has sidewalks, too, but the cement there isn’t as hard on your feet there as it is here, perhaps because there you sometimes walk on the roadsides, through the grass.

  She sees the night city rarely, with neon signs of crimson, yellow, blue, shrieking cigarettes or hotels or brands of cars. Lights should be blazing, impressive. Perhaps if you couldn’t read these would be. By dark she’s usually in her room, in the place where she boards, studying.

  Her boardinghouse is away to hell and gone, North Winnipeg, half a mile beyond the end of the Selkirk Avenue streetcar line. No wonder Mrs. Crawley was so delighted when Morag turned up. She’d probably had a hundred others turn down the room. Morag had thought it might not be possible to find another room. Idiotic. The Crawleys rent only the one room. It is a small house and Morag’s room is about the size of the one she had at Christie’s. The size of a large cupboard. She doesn’t care. She’s used to it. The room will be freezing in winter, she foresees. It has a bed, a dresser and a chair. She uses the dresser top as a desk.

  Mrs. Crawley is a Catholic, although not all that devout. Above Morag’s bed, when she moved in, there hung The Bleeding Heart of Jesus. It looked familiar, and then she remembered–the Tonnerres’ place. Even without this, the picture would be hard enough to endure, Jesus with a soft, yielding, nothing-type face and a straggling wispy beard, His expression that of a dog who knows it is about to be shot. As usual in these pictures, the Heart Itself is shown in violent purplish red, His chest having apparently been sawn open to reveal It, oozing with neatly symmetrical drops of lifeblood, drip-drip-drip. All tear-shaped.

  “Why did you take Our Lord down, Morag?” Mrs. Crawley enquires.

  Not sternly, just sort of wearily. Mrs. Crawley is still quite a young woman, in her late twenties, fluffy short beige hair the colour of a camel-hair coat, and meek blue eyes which only rarely spark with the momentary insistence that she, too, may possibly be real. She and Mr. Crawley have four young kids. Mrs. Crawley sighs a lot.

  “I’m–I’m sorry.” Morag struggles. “It’s hard to explain. I was brought up–”

  What a great lie she is about to perpetrate. As if it would make any difference what church had been her spiritual home, so-called, in her tender years. She would still have wanted to throw up every time she looked at the Heart. Mrs. Crawley, however, is sympathetic.

  “It’s okay, Morag, you never mind, then. I understand you’ve been raised a Protestant. I’ll take it for the girls’ room.”

  Lucky girls, now two and four. But Mrs. Crawley is no bigot. Rather, she is wistful and sometimes defiant.

  “I’d never go against my Faith, Morag,” she declares, “but all the same, I sometimes think–well, you know–if I’d known before I was married what I know now, I’d have had some fun, eh? Not that we do anything to prevent God’s Will, of course. We’re expecting again, did I mention, and soon I’ll be bloated up like a stout old lady with the wind. I wasn’t a bad-looking girl.”

  “You’re still good-looking,” Morag cries, torn with the necessity of saying two things at once, “and anyway, you should’ve seen the snobbishness that went on in the church where I went as a kid. The United, it was.”

  Mrs. Crawley nods, but isn’t really concerned with Comparative Religion.

  “Well, it’s nice of you to say I’m still not too bad-looking,” she says. “I got such awful stretch marks on my stomach and thighs after Marnie. Still, who sees them but Jim?”

  Sad. Sad. Morag vows to have umpteen lovers but no husband. No kids. No stretch marks (what are they?). Mr. Crawley is balding although only thirty-two, and is skinnily pale. He comes home very tired from the Meat Packers where he works, which is no wonder when you consider he has to heave around sides of beef and he looks as though he’d have trouble hoisting a five-pound bag of flour. He is not, Morag has gathered, of a very romantic temperament. Romantic is Mrs. Crawley’s word. It means he believes in making love once a fortnight, at most. Mrs. Crawley is perpetually riven, wanting love and not wanting any more kids. It is a trying situation.

  Mrs. Crawley cooks mainly boiled cabbage and wieners, or boiled turnips and (very small) portions of bacon. With gobs of watery mashed potatoes. It isn’t very different from Christie and Prin’s house. Which is disappointing. Morag considers seeking another room. But how can she, after Mrs. Crawley has confided all that about her sex life, and so on? Also, they need the money. A dilemma. Morag knows she will dislike living here more and more as the winter clenches in, and will be unable to move.

  If Mrs. Crawley were tough, hard-spoken and angry, it would be easy. It is her flaccid lack of fight which makes it impossible. As with Eva Winkler, whom in some ways she resembles. Morag gags inwardly at the weak, against whom she has few defences. But she resents and fears them.

  All the same, Morag talks more with Mrs. Crawley than with any of the golden-appearing college kids. She knows they are not all golden, not all happy, not all inheritors of some as-yet-unspoiled Garden. She isn’t that stupid. She has seen the worse-off ones walking alone and quietly, or else trying to ingratiate themselves, clownlike, into the brazen multitude. These walking wounded she avoids like the plague. It might be catching.

  One day, walking the narrow cracked sidewalks from the end of the streetcar line to the Crawleys’ house, the bare lean board houses reminding her of Hill Street and the leaves still splendid with the last of the upblazing autumn, she hears the geese.

  The Canada geese are flying very high up in their wide V-formation, the few leaders out in front, the flock sounding their far clear cold cry that signals the approaching frost. Going somewhere. Able to go, at will. Last year she saw them and thought This time next year I’ll be away too. Now she is away. Away is here. Not far enough away.

  Morag watches, angrily grieving and loving, until the geese have passed over.

  Winter, and snow of many textures. Hard-packed snow on Portage Avenue and the downtown streets, dirty from the trampling boots. Deep, dry snow, creaking underfoot on the ten-million-mile trek from streetcar to house. And on lawns and little-used roadsides, the drifts are three feet high, crusted and white like royal icing, and when you break through the crust, the snow underneath is light and powdery as icing sugar. Snow everywhere. Black bare tree boughs are transformed overnight into white glittering traceries, candelabra, chandeliers of trees, the sun lighting them as though from within. In the mornings, frost patterns on the bedroom window, painted by windbrushes. Beautiful, but bloody cold. The breath seems to freeze in your throat, and your lungs feel full of ice.

  Morag’s room is so cold in the mornings she can hardly bear to snake slowly out of bed. The Crawleys’ furnace is not efficient and Mr. Crawley does not stoke it sufficiently in the evenings, as Mrs. Crawley fears fire during the night. Morag would rather take the chance, and go out of life, if necessary, in a blazing splendour, gloriously warm. It is, however, not up to her. Taking a bath is a torture. Only those truly devoted to cleanliness would ever venture into the Crawleys’ tepid bath-water and steel-cold tub in midwinter. Morag is one of these (what if I smell?). The Crawley kids are not. Twice a week they scream and shriek as their mother exhaustedly forces them into the bath. The window is right
beside the tub, and the storm-window does not fit properly. December seeps in.

  Morag studies in bed, the dirty wine satin eiderdown drawn around her. Feels ill. Writes home (home?) to Christie, saying she has flu and will not be back in Manawaka for Christmas. Flu or cowardice?

  Christie sends her a money order for five dollars. She cries, under the wine eiderdown, bitterly repentant. But does not change her mind. Reads Paradise Lost, sneezing.

  Memorybank Movie: Ella

  Morag is daring the world of the elect, those who run the college newspaper and who in the literary section print mainly selections from their own prose and poetry. Her story is concealed inside the first volume of Taine’s History of English Literature which she holds nonchalantly under her arm. In the Veritas office, she finds herself standing awkwardly beside a short rather stocky girl with auburn hair. The girl, who is Ella Gerson, is in Morag’s year but they have not spoken before. Ella is holding a copy of Das Kapital nonchalantly under her arm.

  “I’ll bet,” Morag says, grinning, “you’ve got a poem or something stashed away inside that.”

  Ella looks, at first, amazed. Then strikes a hand across her forehead in what later comes to be known as the Sarah Bernhardt gesture.

  “Good God!” she cries, although not so loudly that anyone else can hear. “My guilty secret has been discovered. How’d you know?”

  Morag holds up Taine.

  “Short story.”

  “Oh. Well, hell, and I thought I was being so original.”

  “I wouldn’t have thought of Marx,” Morag says admiringly.

  “If you’d been me, with my mother, you would’ve,” Ella says.

  They wait some more. Hoping to catch the eye or polite enquiry of one of the in-group. No dice. Cacophony surrounds them. Slender blonde girls with breasts bouncing under Shetland wool sweaters dash past bearing copy. There are cries of Who’s gonna make up Page Five? and other technical terms, which fail to impress Morag, as she understands their meaning. Should she offer her services? They’d laugh, probably, to hear about the Manawaka Banner. She thinks of Lachlan with a fondness she never felt for him when she was there. The Veritas editor, Mark Trilling, strolls past, pipe clenched in teeth, frowning in leonine fashion, as befits one in this high calling.

  “Ah, the heck with it,” Ella says, snapping her fingers. “I’m gonna mail it in.”

  “Yeh, me too, I guess,” Morag says. “I don’t trust the mail, though.”

  They go to the coffee shop and brood over cups which neither inebriate nor cheer.

  “You gotta begin somewhere,” Ella says.

  “That’s just it.”

  “Even if it’s only that crumby excuse for a paper.”

  “Exactly. Well, they don’t know what they’ve just passed up.”

  They both despise Veritas now, and will continue to do so until something of theirs is printed therein.

  They show each other their work. Ella’s is a poem, part of a long narrative poem about the Jews in Europe during the war. Auschwitz. Buchenwald. It is written with such an openness of love and bitterness that Morag for a while can’t make it jibe with Ella’s flippancy in speech, which, she now sees, is as determined a cover as her own.

  “Did you have relatives–”

  “Yes,” Ella says. “But it would’ve been the same if I hadn’t.”

  Ella does not live very far from Morag’s place, as it turns out. “Want to come over sometime, Morag? Your boardinghouse sounds like a whole load of shit.”

  “I’d really love to come over. But my place–it isn’t so terrible. Mrs. Crawley’s okay, but just kind of defeated, you know.”

  “Yeh. I know all right. Lumpen proletariat.”

  When explained, the term seems unfair, in Morag’s view. She says so.

  “Whatever gave you the idea I was fair, for God’s sake?” Ella shouts.

  Then they both laugh. Morag tells–can she? she does, though–about Christie and Prin, and about the town. Some, anyway. It is a world which to Ella seems about as warm and inviting as living six feet deep in a snowdrift.

  “How could you take it?” Ella asks.

  “Tell me how I could do anything else.”

  This is a point of view which Ella instantly recognizes.

  “Yeh. That’s so. Let me read your story, now?”

  Morag hands it over. As it is longer than a poem, the waiting period is prolonged. Morag smokes five cigarettes. In comparison with the reach of Ella’s poem, the story is pure unadulterated crap. She longs to snatch it back. But longs even more to know what Ella thinks of it. It concerns a young farmer during the drought, who nearly gives way to despair, but who finally determines to stay alive and to stay with the land.

  “I think it’s good,” Ella says.

  “No kidding?” Morag says hungrily. Then reality sets in once more. “The trouble is, I can see that the ending is kind of implausible, the way I’ve set it up, but I don’t know what to do about it. Not yet, anyway.”

  “Implausible, nuts,” Ella says. “Lots of people did stay, didn’t they?”

  “Oh sure, but–”

  “The barns weren’t overcrowded with hanged farmers, were they?”

  “Well, no, but–”

  “It would have been more implausible,” Ella declares, “if you’d had him going through with the rope on the rafter bit.”

  A friend for life, Ella. Even though Morag knows the story is badly flawed and suspects that Ella knows, too.

  “You really think so?”

  “Sure. Did you–I mean, did you ever know anyone like that, Morag?”

  “No. It’s not based on anyone real.”

  And yet, in a way, it is. She sees the distortion and sees why the story had to end this way. The child, in some way, although without realizing it, saving the father’s life. The father going on living. Could it have ended any other way, the story? No. Anyway, the child isn’t her. She realizes almost with surprise that this is true. The child isn’t her. Can the story child really exist separately? Can it be both her and not her?

  Ella is looking at her oddly.

  “What’s the matter, Morag?”

  “I–don’t know. Sometimes I get–well, scared. I don’t feel all that normal.”

  Ella shrugs.

  “So–who wants to be normal, anyhow?”

  “I do,” Morag says with passionate conviction. “Oh Ella, I do. I want to be able to talk to boys the way they want to be talked to. Only I can’t seem to get the trick of it.”

  “Boys like that are schmucks,” Ella says furiously. “But yeh, I know what you mean.”

  “You too?”

  “Yeh. I went out with this guy a coupla weeks ago, and I thought Now this is It. Here is your opportunity, oh Ella bella. So what did Ella the schlemiel do? Did she tell him how masterful and handsome he was? Not she. Oh no. She began talking in her winsome way about Marx’s theory of polarity. Why? Why? I’ll never see him again.”

  “Well, then, why?” Morag is laughing, but not in mockery.

  “I don’t know,” Ella says gloomily. “It just seemed so phoney, somehow, all that whole mutual flattery bit. And why should I pretend to be brainless? I’m not brainless.”

  “I know,” Morag says. “And yet I envy girls like Susie Trevor so much that I damn near hate them. I want to be glamorous and adored and get married and have kids. I still try to kid myself that I don’t want that. But I do. I want all that. As well. All I want is everything.”

  Ella strikes a theatrical wrist to her forehead. “Engrave it on my tombstone.”

  Morag goes often to the Gersons’ house after this occasion. A small white-painted house, always full of people. Ella’s father died several years ago, and Mrs. Gerson now keeps on the bakery, working there during shop hours and coming back at nights to make dinner for her three daughters.

  Mrs. Gerson is a tall strapping woman whose voice is brisk and bossy but also loving. She does not complain about the large amount of
work she has to do. It never occurs to her that it is large. Her daughters are her life. She considers herself blessed.

  “A nice house like this,” she confides to Morag, “I never thought I would have. You should only have seen the place where me and my husband lived when we first married, in Poland, that was. A hovel. I could tell you things.”

  She stomps out, evenings, to left-wing meetings. If she can bring up her daughters to be socialists, she will not have lived in vain.

  “Ella, she’s okay in that way,” Mrs. Gerson says, “but Janine and Bernice I sometimes doubt.”

  The girls shout with laughter.

  “Mumma, you wait until I marry a rich insurance man or like that,” Janine says, “and you won’t turn down a little luxury. A mink coat, maybe?”

  “A mink coat, who needs it? I’d die of shame to be seen in such a thing.”

  Ella is the middle daughter. Janine is at High School. Bernice is a hairdresser. Both Janine and Bernice, like their mother, have dark hair.

  “Ella, can I ask you something?” Morag says.

  “Ask. I’m inscrutable, but ask.”

  “How come your hair is auburn? Did your father–” Laughter from the Gersons.

  “Poppa would love that,” Ella says. “No. Bernice did it. It was supposed to turn out blonde. That was part of the Glamour Campaign, see? This new advanced technologically perfect method.”

  “Such nonsense,” Mrs. Gerson sniffs. “I told her, you don’t like the colour God gave you? You think you can improve on it?”

  Mrs. Gerson believes in God and Marx simultaneously, and is not dismayed by her daughters’ suggestion of disparity in such a dual faith.

  “You don’t dye the hair,” Ella goes on. “You sort of bleach it. Only when Bernice got mine down to its basic element, here I was this colour.”

  “I thought it was really lucky,” Bernice says. “Blonde would’ve only made you look cheap, anyway.”