who do you think you are?

there were some things rose and her brother brian could safely talk about, without runningaground on principles or statements of position, and one of them was milton homer. they bothremembered that when they had measles and there was a quarantine notice put up on the door—this was long ago, before their father died and before brian went to school—milton homer camealong the street and read it. they heard him coming over the bridge and as usual he wascomplaining loudly. his progress through town was not silent unless his mouth was full of candy;otherwise he would be yelling at dogs and bullying the trees and telephone poles, mulling over oldgrievances.

“and i did not and i did not and i did not!” he yelled, and hit the bridge railing.

rose and brian pulled back the quilt that was hung over the window to keep the light out, sothey would not go blind.

“milton homer,” said brian appreciatively.

milton homer then saw the notice on the door. he turned and mounted the steps and read it. hecould read. he would go along the main street reading all the signs out loud.

rose and brian remembered this and they agreed that it was the side door, where flo later stuckon the glassed- in porch; before that there was only a slanting wooden platform, and theyremembered milton homer standing on it. if the quarantine notice was there and not on the frontdoor, which led into flo’s store, then the store must have been open; that seemed odd, and couldonly be explained by flo’s having bullied the health officer. rose couldn’t remember; she couldonly remember milton homer on the platform with his big head on one side and his fist raised toknock.

“measles, huh?” said milton homer. he didn’t knock, after all; he stuck his head close to thedoor and shouted, “can’t scare me!” then he turned around but did not leave the yard. he walkedover to the swing, sat down, took hold of the ropes and began moodily, then with mounting andferocious glee, to give himself a ride.

“milton homer’s on the swing, milton homer’s on the swing!” rose shouted. she had run fromthe window to the stairwell.

flo came from wherever she was to look out the side window. “he won’t hurt it,” said flosurprisingly. rose had thought she would chase him with the broom. afterwards she wondered:

could flo have been frightened? not likely. it would be a matter of milton homer’s privileges.

“i can’t sit on the seat after milton homer’s sat on it!”

“you! you go on back to bed.”

rose went back into the dark smelly measles room and began to tell brian a story she thoughthe wouldn’t like.

“when you were a baby, milton homer came and picked you up.” “he did not.”

“he came and held you and asked what your name was. i remember.”

brian went out to the stairwell.

“did milton homer come and pick me up and ask what my name was? did he? when i was ababy?”

“you tell rose he did the same for her.”

rose knew that was likely, though she hadn’t been going to mention it. she didn’t really knowif she remembered milton homer holding brian, or had been told about it. whenever there was anew baby in a house, in that recent past when babies were still being born at home, milton homercame as soon as possible and asked to see the baby, then asked its name, and delivered a setspeech. the speech was to the effect that if the baby lived, it was to be hoped it would lead achristian life, and if it died, it was to be hoped it would go straight to heaven. the same idea asbaptism, but milton did not call on the father or the son or do any business with water. he did allthis on his own authority. he seemed to be overcome by a stammer he did not have at other times,or else he stammered on purpose in order to give his pronouncements more weight. he opened hismouth wide and rocked back and forth, taking up each phrase with a deep grunt.

“and if the baby—if the baby—if the baby—lives—”

rose would do this years later, in her brother’s living room, rocking back and forth, chanting,each if coming out like an explo sion, leading up to the major explosion of lives.

“he will live a—good life—and he will—and he will—and he will—not sin. he will lead agood life—a good life—and he will not sin. he will not sin!”

“and if the baby—if the baby—if the baby—dies—”

“now that’s enough. that’s enough, rose,” said brian, but he laughed. he could put up withrose’s theatrics when they were about hanratty.

“how can you remember?” said brian’s wife phoebe, hoping to stop rose before she went ontoo long and roused brian’s impatience. “did you see him do it? that often?”

“oh no,” said rose, with some surprise. “i didn’t see him do it. what i saw was ralph gillespiedoing milton homer. he was a boy in school. ralph.”

milton homer’s other public function, as rose and brian remembered it, was tomarch in parades. there used to be plenty of parades in hanratty. the orange walk, on thetwelfth of july; the high school cadet parade, in may; the schoolchildren’s empire day parade,the legion’s church parade, the santa claus parade, the lions club old-timers’ parade. one ofthe most derogatory things that could be said about anyone in hanratty was that he or she wasfond of parading around, but almost every soul in town—in the town proper, not west hanratty,that goes without saying—would get a chance to march in public in some organized and approvedaffair. the only thing was that you must never look as if you were enjoying it; you had to give theimpression of being called forth out of preferred obscurity; ready to do your duty and gravelypreoccupied with whatever notions the parade celebrated.

the orange walk was the most splendid of all the parades. king billy at the head of it rode ahorse as near pure white as could be found, and the black knights at the rear, the noblest rank oforangemen—usually thin, and poor, and proud and fanatical old farmers—rode dark horses andwore the ancient father-to-son top hats and swallow-tail coats. the banners were all gorgeous silksand embroideries, blue and gold, orange and white, scenes of protestant triumph, lilies and openbibles, mottoes of godliness and honor and flaming bigotry. the ladies came beneath theirsunshades, orangemen’s wives and daughters all wearing white for purity. then the bands, thefifes and drums, and gifted step-dancers performing on a clean haywagon as a movable stage.

also, there came milton homer. he could show up anywhere in the parade and he varied hisplace in it from time to time, stepping out behind king billy or the black knights or the step-dancers or the shy orange-sashed children who carried the banners. behind the black knights hewould pull a dour face, and hold his head as if a top hat was riding on it; behind the ladies hewiggled his hips and diddled an imaginary sunshade. he was a mimic of ferocious gifts andterrible energy. he could take the step-dancers’ tidy show and turn it into an idiot’s prance, andstill keep the beat.

the orange walk was his best opportunity, in parades, but he was conspicuous in all of them.

head in the air, arms whipping out, snootily in step, he marched behind the commanding officer ofthe legion. on empire day he provided himself with a red ensign and a union jack, and keptthem going like whirligigs above his head. in the santa claus parade he snatched candy meant forchildren; he did not do it for a joke.

you would think that somebody in authority in hanratty would have put an end to this. miltonhomer’s contribution to any parade was wholly negative; designed, if milton homer could havedesigned anything, just to make the parade look foolish. why didn’t the organizers and theparaders make an effort to keep him out? they must have decided that was easier said than done.

milton lived with his two old-maid aunts, his parents being dead, and nobody would have liked toask the two old ladies to keep him home. it must have seemed as if they had enough on their handsalready. how could they keep him in, once he had heard the band? they would have to lock himup, tie him down. and nobody wanted to haul him out and drag him away once things began. hisprotests would have ruined everything. there wasn’t any doubt that he would protest. he had astrong, deep voice and he was a strong man, though not very tall. he was about the size ofnapoleon. he had kicked through gates and fences when people tried to shut him out of theiryards. once he had smashed a child’s wagon on the sidewalk, simply because it was in his way.

letting him participate must have seemed the best choice, under the circumstances.

not that it was done as the best of bad choices. nobody looked askance at milton in a parade;everybody was used to him. even the commanding officer would let himself be mocked, and theblack knights with their old black grievances took no notice. people just said, “oh, there’smilton,” from the sidewalk. there wasn’t much laughing at him, though strangers in town, cityrelatives invited to watch the parade, might point him out and laugh themselves silly, thinking hewas there officially and for purposes of comic relief, like the clowns who were actually youngbusinessmen, unsuccessfully turning cartwheels.

“who is that?” the visitors said, and were answered with nonchalance and a particularly obscuresort of pride.

“that’s just milton homer. it wouldn’t be a parade without milton homer.”

“the village idiot,” said phoebe, trying to comprehend these things, with her inexhaustibleunappreciated politeness, and both rose and brian said that they had never heard him describedthat way. they had never thought of hanratty as a village. a village was a cluster of picturesquehouses around a steepled church on a christmas card. villagers were the costumed chorus in thehigh school operetta. if it was necessary to describe milton homer to an outsider, people wouldsay that he was “not all there.” rose had wondered, even at that time, what was the part thatwasn’t there? she still wondered. brains, would be the easiest answer. milton homer must surelyhave had a low i.q. yes; but so did plenty of people, in hanratty and out of it, and they did notdistinguish themselves as he did. he could read without difficulty, as shown in the case of thequarantine sign; he knew how to count his change, as evidenced in many stories about how peoplehad tried to cheat him. what was missing was a sense of precaution, rose thought now. socialinhibition, though there was no such name for it at that time. whatever it is that ordinary peoplelose when they are drunk, milton homer never had, or might have chosen not to have— and this iswhat interests rose—at some point early in life. even his expressions, his everyday looks, werethose that drunks wear in theatrical extremity—goggling, leering, drooping looks that seemedboldly calculated, and at the same time helpless, involuntary; is such a thing possible?

the two ladies milton homer lived with were his mother’s sisters. they were twins; theirnames were hattie and mattie milton, and they were usually called miss hattie and miss mattie,perhaps to detract from any silly sound their names might have had otherwise. milton had beennamed after his mother’s family. that was a common practice, and there was probably no thoughtof linking together the names of two great poets. that coincidence was never mentioned and wasperhaps not noticed. rose did not notice it until one day in high school when the boy who satbehind her tapped her on the shoulder and showed her what he had written in his english book. hehad stroked out the word chapman’s in the title of a poem and inked in the word milton, so thatthe title now read: on first looking into milton homer.

any mention of milton homer was a joke, but this changed title was also a joke because itreferred, rather weakly, to milton homer’s more scandalous behavior. the story was that when hegot behind somebody in a line-up at the post office or a movie theater, he would open his coat andpresent himself, then lunge and commence rubbing. though of course he wouldn’t get that far; theobject of his passion would have ducked out of his way. boys were said to dare each other to gethim into position, and stay close ahead of him until the very last moment, then jump aside andreveal him in dire importunity.

it was in honor of this story—whether it was true or not, had happened once, under provocation,or kept happening all the time—that ladies crossed the street when they saw milton coming, thatchildren were warned to stay clear of him. just don’t let him monkey around was what flo said.

he was allowed into houses on those ritual occasions when there was a new baby—with hospitalbirths getting commoner, those occasions diminished—but at other times the doors were lockedagainst him. he would come and knock, and kick the door panels, and go away. but he was lethave his way in yards, because he didn’t take things, and could do so much damage if offended.

of course, it was another story altogether when he appeared with one of his aunts. at thosetimes he was hangdog-looking, well-behaved; his powers and his passions, whatever they were, allbanked and hidden. he would be eating candy the aunt had bought him, out of a paper bag. heoffered it when told to, though nobody but the most greedy person alive would touch what mighthave been touched by milton homer’s fingers or blessed by his spittle. the aunts saw that he gothis hair cut; they did their best to keep him presentable. they washed and ironed and mended hisclothes, sent him out in his raincoat and rubbers, or knitted cap and muffler, as the weatherindicated. did they know how he conducted himself when out of their sight? they must haveheard, and if they heard they must have suffered, being people of pride and methodist morals. itwas their grandfather who had started the flax mill in hanratty and compelled all his employees tospend their saturday nights at a bible class he himself conducted. the homers, too, were decentpeople. some of the homers were supposed to be in favor of putting milton away but the miltonladies wouldn’t do it. nobody suggested they refused out of tender-heartedness.

“they won’t put him in the asylum, they’re too proud.”

miss hattie milton taught at the high school. she had been teach ing there longer than all theother teachers combined and was more important than the principal. she taught english—thealteration in the poem was the more daring and satisfying because it occurred under her nose—andthe thing she was famous for was keeping order. she did this without apparent effort, through theforce of her large-bosomed, talcumed, spectacled, innocent and powerful presence, and her refusalto see that there was any difference between teen-agers (she did not use the word) and students ingrade four. she assigned a lot of memory work. one day she wrote a long poem on the board andsaid that everyone was to copy it out, then learn it off by heart, and the next day recite it. this waswhen rose was in her third or fourth year at high school and she did not believe these instructionswere to be taken literally. she learned poetry with ease; it seemed reasonable to her to skip the firststep. she read the poem and learned it, verse by verse, then said it over a couple of times in herhead. while she was doing this miss hattie asked her why she wasn’t copying.

rose replied that she knew the poem already, though she was not perfectly sure that this wastrue.

“do you really?” said miss hattie. “stand up and face the back of the room.”

rose did so, trembling for her boast.

“now recite the poem to the class.”

rose’s confidence was not mistaken. she recited without a hitch.

what did she expect to follow? astonishment, and compliments, and unaccustomed respect?

“well, you may know the poem,” miss hattie said, “but that is no excuse for not doing whatyou were told. sit down and write it in your book. i want you to write every line three times. ifyou don’t get finished you can stay after four.”

rose did have to stay after four, of course, raging and writing while miss hattie got out hercrocheting. when rose took the copy to her desk miss hattie said mildly enough but with finality,“you can’t go thinking you are better than other people just because you can learn poems. who doyou think you are?”

this was not the first time in her life rose had been asked who she thought she was; in fact thequestion had often struck her like a monotonous gong and she paid no attention to it. but sheunderstood, afterwards, that miss hattie was not a sadistic teacher; she had refrained from sayingwhat she now said in front of the class. and she was not vindictive; she was not taking revengebecause she had not believed rose and had been proved wrong. the lesson she was trying to teachhere was more important to her than any poem, and one she truly believed rose needed. it seemedthat many other people believed she needed it, too.

the whole class was invited, at the end of the senior year, to a lantern slide show at themiltons’ house. the lantern slides were of china, where miss mattie, the stay-at-home twin, hadbeen a missionary in her youth. miss mattie was very shy, and she stayed in the background,working the slides, while miss hattie commented. the lantern slides showed a yellow country;much as expected. yellow hills and sky; yellow people, rickshaws, parasols, all dry and papery-looking, fragile, unlikely, with black zigzags where the paint had cracked, on the temples, theroads and faces. at this very time, the one and only time rose sat in the miltons’ parlor, mao wasin power in china and the korean war was underway, but miss hattie made no concessions tohistory, any more than she made concessions to the fact that the members of her audience wereeighteen and nineteen years old.

“the chinese are heathens,” miss hattie said. “that is why they have beggars.”

there was a beggar, kneeling in the street, arms outstretched to a rich lady in a rickshaw, whowas not paying any attention to him.

“they do eat things we wouldn’t touch,” miss hattie said. some chinese were pictured pokingsticks into bowls. “but they eat a better diet when they become christians. the first generation ofchristians is an inch and a half taller.”

christians of the first generation were standing in a row with their mouths open, possiblysinging. they wore black and white clothes.

after the slides, plates of sandwiches, cookies, tarts were served. all were home-made and verygood. a punch of grape juice and ginger-ale was poured into paper cups. milton sat in a corner inhis thick tweed suit, a white shirt and a tie, on which punch and crumbs had already been spilled.

“some day it will just blow up in their faces,” flo had said darkly, meaning milton. could thatbe the reason people came, year after year, to see the lantern slides and drink the punch that all thejokes were about? to see milton with his jowls and stomach swollen as if with bad intentions,ready to blow? all he did was stuff himself at an unbelievable rate. it seemed as if he downed datesquares, hermits, nanaimo bars and fruit drops, butter tarts and brownies, whole, the way a snakewill swallow frogs. milton was similarly distended.

methodists were people whose power in hanratty was passing, but slowly. the days ofthe compulsory bible class were over. perhaps the miltons didn’t know that. perhaps they knew itbut put a heroic face on their decline. they behaved as if the requirements of piety hadn’t changedand as if its connection with prosperity was unaltered. their brick house, with its overstuffedcomfort, their coats with collars of snug dull fur, seemed proclaimed as a methodist house,methodist clothing, inelegant on purpose, heavy, satisfactory. everything about them seemed tosay that they had applied themselves to the world’s work for god’s sake, and god had not let themdown. for god’s sake the hall floor shone with wax around the runner, the lines were drawnperfectly with a straight pen in the account book, the begonias flourished, the money went into thebank.

but mistakes were made, nowadays. the mistake the milton ladies made was in drawing up apetition to be sent to the canadian broadcasting corporation, asking for the removal from the airof the programs that interfered with church-going on sunday nights: edgar bergen and charliemccarthy; jack benny; fred allen. they got the minister to speak about their petition in church—this was in the united church, where methodists had been outnumbered by presbyterians andcongregationalists, and it was not a scene rose witnessed, but had described to her by flo—andafterwards they waited, miss hattie and miss mattie, one on each side of the outgoing stream,intending to deflect people and make them sign the petition, which was set up on a little table inthe church vestibule. behind the table milton homer was sitting. he had to be there; they never lethim get out of going to church on sunday. they had given him a job to keep him busy; he was tobe in charge of the fountain pens, making sure they were full and handing them to signers.

that was the obvious part of the mistake. milton had got the idea of drawing whiskers onhimself, and had done so, without the help of a mirror. whiskers curled out over his big sadcheeks, up towards his bloodshot foreboding eyes. he had put the pen in his mouth, too, so thatink had blotched his lips. in short, he had made himself so comical a sight that the petition whichnobody really wanted could be treated as a comedy, too, and the power of the milton sisters, theflax-mill methodists, could be seen as a leftover dribble. people smiled and slid past; nothingcould be done. of course the milton ladies didn’t scold milton or put on any show for the public,they just bundled him up with their petition and took him home.

“that was the end of them thinking they could run things,” flo said. it was hard to tell, asalways, what particular defeat—was it that of religion or pretension?—she was so glad to see.

the boy who showed rose the poem in miss hattie’s own english class in hanratty highschool was ralph gillespie, the same boy who specialized in milton homer imitations. as roseremembered it, he hadn’t started on the imitations at the time he showed her the poem. they camelater, during the last few months he was in school. in most classes he sat ahead of rose or behindher, due to the alphabetical closeness of their names. beyond this alphabetical closeness they didhave something like a family similarity, not in looks but in habits or tendencies. instead ofembarrassing them, as it would have done if they had really been brother and sister, this drewthem together in helpful conspiracy. both of them lost or mislaid, or never adequately providedthemselves with, all the pencils, rulers, erasers, pen-nibs, ruled paper, graph paper, the compass,dividers, protractor, necessary for a successful school life; both of them were sloppy with ink,subject to spilling and blotting mishaps; both of them were negligent about doing homework butpanicky about not having done it. so they did their best to help each other out, sharing whateversupplies they had, begging from their more provident neighbors, finding someone’s homework tocopy. they developed the comradeship of captives, of soldiers who have no heart for thecampaign, wishing only to survive and avoid action.

that wasn’t quite all. their shoes and boots became well acquainted, scuffling and pushing infriendly and private encounter, sometimes resting together a moment in tentative encouragement;this mutual kindness particularly helped them through those moments when people were beingselected to do mathematics problems on the blackboard.

once ralph came in after noon hour with his hair full of snow. he leaned back and shook thesnow over rose’s desk, saying, “do you have those dandruff blues?”

“no. mine’s white.”

this seemed to rose a moment of some intimacy, with its physi cal frankness, its rememberedchildhood joke. another day at noon hour, before the bell rang, she came into the classroom andfound him, in a ring of onlookers, doing his milton homer imitation. she was surprised andworried; surprised because his shyness in class had always equalled hers and had been one of thethings that united them; worried that he might not be able to bring it off, might not make themlaugh. but he was very good; his large, pale, good-natured face took on the lumpy desperation ofmilton’s; his eyes goggled and his jowls shook and his words came out in a hoarse hypnotizedsingsong. he was so successful that rose was amazed, and so was everybody else. from that timeon ralph began to do imitations; he had several, but milton homer was his trademark. rose neverquite got over a comradely sort of apprehension on his behalf. she had another feeling as well, notenvy but a shaky sort of longing. she wanted to do the same. not milton homer; she did not wantto do milton homer. she wanted to fill up in that magical, releasing way, transform herself; shewanted the courage and the power.

not long after he started publicly developing these talents he had, ralph gillespie dropped outof school. rose missed his feet and his breathing and his finger tapping her shoulder. she met himsometimes on the street but he did not seem to be quite the same person. they never stopped totalk, just said hello and hurried past. they had been close and conspiring for years, it seemed,maintaining their spurious domesticity, but they had never talked outside of school, never gonebeyond the most formal recognition of each other, and it seemed they could not, now. rose neverasked him why he had dropped out; she did not even know if he had found a job. they knew eachother’s necks and shoulders, heads and feet, but were not able to confront each other as full-lengthpresences.

after a while rose didn’t see him on the street any more. she heard that he had joined thenavy. he must have been just waiting till he was old enough to do that. he had joined the navyand gone to halifax. the war was over, it was only the peacetime navy. just the same it was oddto think of ralph gillespie, in uniform, on the deck of a destroyer, maybe firing off guns. rosewas just beginning to understand that the boys she knew, however incompetent they might seem,were going to turn into men, and be allowed to do things that you would think required a lot moretalent and authority than they could have.

there was a time, after she gave up the store and before her arthritis became too crippling,during which flo went out to bingo games and sometimes played cards with her neighbors at thelegion hall. when rose was home on a visit conversation was difficult, so she would ask floabout the people she saw at the legion. she would ask for news of her own contemporaries, horsenicholson, runt chesterton, whom she could not really imagine as grown men; did flo ever seethem?

“there’s one i see and he’s around there all the time. ralph gillespie.”

rose said that she had thought ralph gillespie was in the navy. “he was too but he’s backhome now. he was in an accident.” “what kind of accident?”

“i don’t know. it was in the navy. he was in a navy hospital three solid years. they had torebuild him from scratch. he’s all right now except he walks with a limp, he sort of drags the oneleg.”

“that’s too bad.”

“well, yes. that’s what i say. i don’t hold any grudge against him but there’s some up there atthe legion that do.”

“hold a grudge?”

“because of the pension,” said flo, surprised and rather contemptuous of rose for not takinginto account so basic a fact of life, and so natural an attitude, in hanratty. “they think, well, he’sset for life. i say he must’ve suffered for it. some people say he gets a lot but i don’t believe it. hedoesn’t need much, he’s all on his own. one thing, if he suffers pain he don’t let on. like me. idon’t let on. weep and you weep alone. he’s a good darts player. he’ll play anything that’s going.

and he can imitate people to the life.”

“does he still do milton homer? he used to do milton homer at school.”

“he does him. milton homer. he’s comical at that. he does some others too.”

“is milton homer still alive? is he still marching in parades?” “sure he’s still alive. he’squietened down a lot, though. he’s out there at the county home and you can see him on a sunnyday down by the highway keeping an eye on the traffic and licking up an ice cream cone. both theold ladies is dead.”

“so he isn’t in the parades any more?”

“there isn’t the parades to be in. parades have fallen off a lot. all the orangemen are dying outand you wouldn’t get the turnout, anyway, people’d rather stay home and watch their t.v.”

on later visits rose found that flo had turned against the legion. “i don’t want to be one ofthose old crackpots,” she said.

“what old crackpots?”

“sit around up there telling the same stupid yarns and drinking beer. they make me sick.”

this was very much in flo’s usual pattern. people, places, amusements, went abruptly in andout of favor. the turnabouts had become more drastic and frequent with age.

“don’t you like any of them any more? is ralph gillespie still going there?”

“he still is. he likes it so well he tried to get himself a job there. he tried to get the part-timebar job. some people say he got turned down because he already has got the pension but i think itwas because of the way he carries on.”

“how? does he get drunk?”

“you couldn’t tell if he was, he carries on just the same, imitating, and half the time he’simitating somebody that the newer people that’s come to town, they don’t know even who theperson was, they just think it’s ralph being idiotic.”

“like milton homer?”

“that’s right. how do they know it’s supposed to be milton homer and what was miltonhomer like? they don’t know. ralph don’t know when to stop. he milton homer’d himself rightout of a job.”

after rose had taken flo to the county home—she had not seen milton homer there, thoughshe had seen other people she had long believed dead—and was staying to clean up the house andget it ready for sale, she herself was taken to the legion by flo’s neighbors, who thought she mustbe lonely on a saturday night. she did not know how to refuse, so she found herself sitting at along table in the basement of the hall, where the bar was, just at the time the last sunlight wascoming across the fields of beans and corn, across the gravel parking lot and through the highwindows, staining the plywood walls. all around the walls were photographs, with names letteredby hand and taped to the frames. rose got up to have a look at them. the hundred and sixth, justbefore embarkation, 1915. various heroes of that war, whose names were carried on by sons andnephews, but whose existence had not been known to her before. when she came back to the tablea card game had started. she wondered if it had been a disruptive thing to do, getting up to look atthe pictures. probably nobody ever looked at them; they were not for looking at; they were justthere, like the plywood on the walls. visitors, outsiders, are always looking at things, alwaystaking an interest, asking who was this, when was that, trying to liven up the conversation. theyput too much in; they want too much out. also, it could have looked as if she was parading aroundthe room, asking for attention.

a woman sat down and introduced herself. she was the wife of one of the men playing cards.

“i’ve seen you on television,” she said. rose was always a bit apologetic when somebody saidthis; that is, she had to control what she recognized in herself as an absurd impulse to apologize.

here in hanratty the impulse was stronger than usual. she was aware of having done things thatmust seem high- handed. she remembered her days as a television interviewer, her beguilingconfidence and charm; here as nowhere else they must understand how that was a sham. heracting was another matter. the things she was ashamed of were not what they must think she wasashamed of; not a flopping bare breast, but a failure she couldn’t seize upon or explain.

this woman who was talking to her did not belong to hanratty. she said she had come fromsarnia when she was married, fifteen years ago.

“i still find it hard to get used to. frankly i do. after the city. you look better in person than youdo in that series.”

“i should hope so,” said rose, and told about how they made her up. people were interested inthings like that and rose was more comfortable, once the conversation got on to technical details.

“well, here’s old ralph,” the woman said. she moved over, making room for a thin, gray-haired man holding a mug of beer. this was ralph gillespie. if rose had met him on the street shewould not have recognized him, he would have been a stranger to her, but after she had looked athim for a moment he seemed quite unchanged to her, unchanged from himself at seventeen orfifteen, his gray hair which had been light brown still falling over his forehead, his face still paleand calm and rather large for his body, the same diffident, watchful, withholding look. but hisbody was thinner and his shoulders seemed to have shrunk together. he wore a short-sleevedsweater with a little collar and three ornamental buttons; it was light-blue with beige and yellowstripes. this sweater seemed to rose to speak of aging jauntiness, a kind of petrified adolescence.

she noticed that his arms were old and skinny and that his hands shook so badly that he used bothof them to raise the glass of beer to his mouth.

“you’re not staying around here long, are you?” said the woman who had come from sarnia.

rose said that she was going to toronto tomorrow, sunday, night.

“you must have a busy life,” the woman said, with a large sigh, an honest envy that in itselfwould have declared out-of-town origins.

rose was thinking that on monday at noon she was to meet a man for lunch and to go to bed.

this man was tom shepherd, whom she had known for a long time. at one time he had been inlove with her, he had written love letters to her. the last time she had been with him, in toronto,when they were sitting up in bed afterwards drinking gin and tonic—they always drank a gooddeal when they were together—rose suddenly thought, or knew, that there was somebody now,some woman he was in love with and was courting from a distance, probably writing letters to,and that there must have been another woman he was robustly bedding, at the time he was writingletters to her. also, and all the time, there was his wife. rose wanted to ask him about this; thenecessity, the difficulties, the satisfactions. her interest was friendly and uncritical but she knew,she had just enough sense to know, that the question would not do.

the conversation in the legion had turned on lottery tickets, bingo games, winnings. the menplaying cards—flo’s neighbor among them—were talking about a man who was supposed to havewon ten thousand dollars, and never publicized the fact, because he had gone bankrupt a few yearsbefore and owed so many people money.

one of them said that if he had declared himself bankrupt, he didn’t owe the money any more.

“maybe he didn’t owe it then,” another said. “but he owes it now. the reason is, he’s got itnow.”

this opinion was generally favored.

rose and ralph gillespie looked at each other. there was the same silent joke, the sameconspiracy, comfort; the same, the same.

“i hear you’re quite a mimic,” rose said.

that was wrong; she shouldn’t have said anything. he laughed and shook his head.

“oh, come on. i hear you do a sensational milton homer.” “i don’t know about that.”

“is he still around?”

“far as i know he’s out at the county home.”

“remember miss hattie and miss mattie? they had the lantern slide show at their house.”

“sure.”

“my mental picture of china is still pretty well based on those slides.”

rose went on talking like this, though she wished she could stop. she was talking in whatelsewhere might have been considered an amusing, confidential, recognizably and meaninglesslyflirtatious style. she did not get much response from ralph gillespie, though he seemed attentive,even welcoming. all the time she talked, she was wondering what he wanted her to say. he didwant something. but he would not make any move to get it. her first impression of him, asboyishly shy and ingratiating, had to change. that was his surface. underneath he was self-sufficient, resigned to living in bafflement, perhaps proud. she wished that he would speak to herfrom that level, and she thought he wished it, too, but they were prevented.

but when rose remembered this unsatisfactory conversation she seemed to recall a wave ofkindness, of sympathy and forgiveness, though certainly no words of that kind had been spoken.

that peculiar shame which she carried around with her seemed to have been eased. the thing shewas ashamed of, in acting, was that she might have been paying attention to the wrong things,reporting antics, when there was always something further, a tone, a depth, a light, that shecouldn’t get and wouldn’t get. and it wasn’t just about acting she suspected this. everything shehad done could sometimes be seen as a mistake. she had never felt this more strongly than whenshe was talking to ralph gillespie, but when she thought about him afterwards her mistakesappeared unimportant. she was enough a child of her time to wonder if what she felt about himwas simply sexual warmth, sexual curiosity; she did not think it was. there seemed to be feelingswhich could only be spoken of in translation; perhaps they could only be acted on in translation;not speaking of them and not acting on them is the right course to take because translation isdubious. dangerous, as well.

for these reasons rose did not explain anything further about ralph gillespie to brian andphoebe when she recalled milton homer’s ceremony with babies or his expression of diabolicalhappiness on the swing. she did not even mention that he was dead. she knew he was deadbecause she still had a subscription to the hanratty paper. flo had given rose a seven- yearsubscription on the last christmas when she felt obliged to give christmas presents;characteristically, flo said that the paper was just for people to get their names in and hadn’tanything in it worth reading. usually rose turned the pages quickly and put the paper in thefirebox. but she did see the story about ralph which was on the front page.

former navy man dies

mr. ralph gillespie, naval petty officer, retired, sustained fatal head injuries atthe legion hall on saturday night last. no other person was implicated in the falland unfortunately several hours passed before mr. gillespie’s body wasdiscovered. it is thought that he mistook the basement door for the exit door andlost his balance, which was precarious due to an old injury suffered in his navalcareer which left him partly disabled.

the paper went on to give the names of ralph’s parents, who were apparently still alive, and ofhis married sister. the legion was taking charge of the funeral services.

rose didn’t tell this to anybody, glad that there was one thing at least she wouldn’t spoil bytelling, though she knew it was lack of material as much as honorable restraint that kept her quiet.

what could she say about herself and ralph gillespie, except that she felt his life, close, closerthan the lives of men she’d loved, one slot over from her own?