Who Do You Think You Are

into the classroom and found him, in a ring of onlookers, doing his Milton Homer imitation. She was surprised and worried; surprised because his shyness in class had always equalled hers and had been one of the things that united them; worried that he might not be able to bring it off, might not make them laugh. But he was very good; his large, pale, good-natured face took on the lumpy desperation of Milton’s; his eyes goggled and his jowls shook and his words came out in a hoarse hypnotized singsong. He was so successful that Rose was amazed, and so was everybody else. From that time on Ralph began to do imitations; he had several, but Milton Homer was his trademark. Rose never quite got over a comradely sort of apprehension on his behalf. She had another feeling as well, not envy but a shaky sort of longing. She wanted to do the same. Not Milton Homer; she did not want to do Milton Homer. She wanted to fill up in that magical, releasing way, transform herself; she wanted the courage and the power.
    Not long after he started publicly developing these talents he had, Ralph Gillespie dropped out of school. Rose missed his feet and his breathing and his finger tapping her shoulder. She met him sometimes on the street but he did not seem to be quite the same person. They never stopped to talk, 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 gone beyond the most formal recognition of each other, and it seemed they could not, now. Rose never asked him why he had dropped out; she did not even know if he had found a job. They knew each other’s necks and shoulders, heads and feet, but were not able to confront each other as full-length presences.
    After a while Rose didn’t see him on the street any more. She heard that he had joined the Navy. He must have been just waiting till he was old enough to do that. He had joined the Navy and gone to Halifax. The war was over, it was only the peacetime Navy. Just the same it was odd to think of Ralph Gillespie, in uniform, on the deck of a destroyer, maybe firing off guns. Rose was 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 more talent and authority than they could have.
    T HERE 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 the Legion Hall. When Rose was home on a visit conversation was difficult, so she would ask Flo about the people she saw at the Legion. She would ask for news of her own contemporaries, Horse Nicholson, Runt Chesterton, whom she could not really imagine as grown men; did Flo ever see them?
    “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 back home 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 to rebuild him from scratch. He’s all right now except he walks with a limp, he sort of drags the one leg.”
    “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 at the Legion that do.”
    “Hold a grudge?”
    “Because of the pension,” said Flo, surprised and rather contemptuous of Rose for not taking into account so basic a fact of life, and so natural an attitude, in Hanratty. “They think, well, he’s set for life. I say he must’ve suffered for it. Some people say he gets a lot but I don’t believe it. He doesn’t need much, he’s all on his own. One thing, if he suffers pain he don’t let on. Like me. I don’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’s quietened down a lot, though. He’s out there at the County Home and you can see him on a sunny day down by the highway keeping an eye on the