Ruth is equal parts infuriating and hurting. Like Karin, in Alice Munro’s “Rich as Stink”, these girls are angered and confused by the connections they observe between the adults in their lives.
In “Thank You for the Lovely Tea”, readers meet Ruth when she is desperate to be out of art class, in the Canadian boarding school she attends. When she is out of the class, however, and in the tearoom with Mrs. Holland, she is just as reckless and ruthless.
The tension resides in Ruth, not in her surroundings, and the tearoom is the ideal backdrop. Its smells of “tea, wet coats, and steam heating” hang thick The barbs and digs stand out in relief against the swollen room.
All the things that the art teacher was discussing are elements that readers can spot in Mavis Gallant’s story as well: perspective, proportion, and authority.
For instance, we are taught to measure and find the points of action between extremes. The school Ruth attends is neither Gothic nor Tudor, but an untidy and relatively new hybrid. There is considerable debate about whether the religious instruction in the school is either too high or too low. The girls’ wardrobes reflect these extremes: either the tunics or the veils are too long or too short. Exams are finished but the school days persist. And the students who require particular attention are under the care of an elderly house-keeper, who is neither staff nor servant.
It would be simpler to inhabit just one voice, to sit in the seat of just one of the tearoom attendees: be it in the place of Mrs. Holland or Ruth, or of one of the other two girls who were invited to accompany Ruth, either May or Helen.
But Mavis Gallant allows us to glimpse the experiences of each character. So we see Mrs. Holland dismiss Helen as “cold and stupid”. But, we also see Helen feel pity for Mrs. Holland: “As far as she knew, there were no happy adults, other than teachers.”
And it would be simplest to receive a pronouncement at the end, so that we understand with whom our sympathy should lie. But we are unsure what or whom to trust. The school building is said to have been an abbey, but that is not true. The school’s founder is not a saintly figure, but a wealthy fruit importer. And Mrs. Hammond is to be Ruth’s step-mother but she seems to neither want nor deserve the role. Perhaps it’s much the same as she feels about religion: “she would believe in something if only she could”.
So we are left to admire Mrs. Holland for daring to order a sundae. “Mothers and their substitutes were expected to drink tea and nibble at flabby pâté sandwiches.”
Even while we also sneer at her a little. “And, really, watching her, one felt she had too much for any one woman to handle: a purse, umbrella, and gloves.”
Mavis Gallant handles it all so deftly. Simultaneously making us want to peer more closely. Even when the smell of wet coats is making it hard to breathe.
Note: This is part of a series of posts on Mavis Gallant’s stories, as I read through her short fiction. This is the first story in Home Truths. Please feel free to check the schedule and join in, for the series, or for a single story; I would love the company.
Next story:”Jorinda and Jorindel”.
Home Truths Stories: Thank You for the Lovely Tea / Jorinda and Jorindel / Saturday / Up North / Orphans’ Progress / The Prodigal Parent / In the Tunnel / The Ice Wagon Going Down the Street / Bonaventure / Virus X / In Youth is Pleasure / Between Zero and One / Varieties of Exile / Voices Lost in Snow / The Doctor / With a Capital T
I finally just read this story. I loved it. Ruth is awful but Mrs. Holland’s passivity was also off-putting. Yet I felt sympathy for her – she was trying so hard. Even sympathy for Ruth in her motherlessness. I think this was a wonderful introduction to Gallant. Thanks for the push.
I’m so glad this was your first Mavis Gallant story. That you could join where there is tea on the table! 🙂
Today’s story, “Thanks for a Lovely Tea” is set on a rainy day somewhere in Canada around 1931. It centers on a teenage girl, Ruth, placed in a boarding school after her mother passed. I admit as I read this story I wondep if I might find, or read into the story, a glimpse as to why Gallant moved out of the country as soon as she could and for sure I did. The story is replete with images evoking a bland repressed emotion rejecting society.
The story begins on a slow time of day in the slowest period of the school year. The virtues of Ruth is that she is patient, self-controlled. The King has just died along with the Kipling, a celebrator of British colonialism. The just retired head mistress is described as a spinister. Two other girls live at the school full time, friends with Ruth. Ruth is further described as placid, lazy. The school patron is a wealthy fruit merchant. The girls wear uniforms, no showing of teenage looks or family wealth.
All is not well for Ruth, as we might have guessed. Her widowed father has a lady friend, Mrs Holland (reaching here “Holland” might evoke, in 1932, a very bland place, far from Paris). Mrs Holland has come to take her to tea at a fancy department store. Ruth brings her two friends. We never learn what Mrs Holland looks like, how she met Ruth’s father, her first name or her life history. Ruth seems her and her father as to elderly for serious romance.
The tea is a classic of repressed emotion, Mrs Holland, you can tell, wishes it was just her and Ruth. Ruth, it seems to me brought her friends along to prevent Mrs Holland from broaching the idea of her marrying Ruth’s father. Mrs Holland sees the girls as “cold little Canadians”. Now I wondered could Mrs Holland actually be an American? As the story closed the head mistress asks Mrs Holland if the girls thanked her for tea.
That’s an excellent question, Mel: I, too, wonder at Mrs. Holland’s heritage/connections. She does feel very much like an outsider, an observer. But, then, I suppose Mavis Gallant felt the same way, distanced from other Canadians (say, in “The Ice Wagon Going Down the Street”).
Maybe she is an American. Or, is ‘Holland’ supposed to, as you’ve wondered, conjured up images of the Continent. After all, she does seem to feel some of the fondness expressed for the King and for Kipling, “great” men lost, which might be more likely true of a woman on the Continent rather than an American woman?
The back-story is one that we can hardly glimpse. (We have even less of Ruth’s father than we had of the father/grandfather in “Irina”.) And the romance seems unthinkable, I guess partly because Ruth doesn’t see it as anything real/meaningful and partly because we have such a narrow view of Mrs. Holland, in which she seems completely separate from Ruth’s father and from Ruth herself, except in this formal, distanced way.
http://rereadinglives.blogspot.com/2019/02/thank-you-for-lovely-tea-by-mavis.html
Thanks for including your link to your post: I encourage other Gallant readers to check out your short story posts, especially all the reading you’ve been doing of Jewish/Yiddish writers.
I love the sound of this story. One day, when I am buying books again, I will get some Mavis Gallant.
At least you’re reading short stories this year: that’s something! 🙂
I read short stories every year, I just want to read more this year.
And it seems like you’ve gotten right to it! Any favourites so far this year that Gallant readers might appreciate?
I think I’d like to read anything that takes place in a tearoom quite frankly!
The other tearooms in her stories have, I believe, been in Europe: it’s nice to know there’s one in Canada that we can seek out. 🙂