THE ICE WAGON GOING DOWN THE STREET
by Mavis Gallant, 1964

In many of Mavis Gallant's short stories characters suffer from an unwillingness to grow. They become trapped in self-images engendered by their pasts, and they refuse to recognize the passage of time. As such they become, in the words of David O'Rourke, "exiles in time." They continue to think and behave in habitual ways, remaining willfully blind to what they have become.

Two such characters are Peter and Sheilah Frazier in "The Ice Wagon Going down the Street," a story collected in My Heart Is Broken. Peter sees himself as a man of leisure, a member of a patrician family experiencing only temporary financial difficulties. He belongs, he feels, to a higher class than most and therefore deserves suitable employment for someone of his standing. Until he is able to find such a position, he will accept nothing that is more in keeping with his true status. Sheilah shares and reinforces his pretensions.

"Now that they are out of world affairs and back where they started," the story begins, revealing immediately the high opinion both Peter and Sheilah have of themselves. We learn that they and their daughters have descended on Peter's sister and been their houseguests for 17 weeks, considering the free room and board to be their right. Indeed, Peter believes that the world owes him a living, and not just any kind either. His daughters wonder, "What job will Peter consent to accept?" Peter and Sheilah retain a distinct class consciousness, while their daughters, who represent a younger generation, are "more cautious than their parents; more Canadian." Social conditions have changed, but not in the way Peter and Sheilah think.

Of course, the Fraziers consider their current economic state to be none of their own fault. They believe that they are simply insufficiently ruthless, "crooked," or vulgar to succeed today. The story then portrays their memories of past glories—plans in Paris, Germany, and Geneva by which they would be set for life. But Peter will not do the demeaning things necessary to earn actual money. When he finds a job working in a minor office of an international agency, even then he succeeds in doing very little. He is one of Gallant's most ineffectual exiles and a holdover from a long dead past.

Peter's efforts to secure a job reveal much about him and his relationship with Sheilah. At a wedding reception, when he drunk-enly makes fun of the groom, Sheilah cautions him: "Every single person who can do something for you is in this room. If you love me, you'll get up." Love appears to be a small element in their relationship. They need each other because they are partners in parasitism. Peter's sister Lucille manages to get him the filing job, but Peter is convinced that, despite all evidence to the contrary, someone "higher up" must have been watching out for him.

As noted above, Peter handles the job with his usual incompetence, and Sheilah copes by pretending that "they were in Paris and life was still the same." In other words, both continue to live in the past, shutting their eyes to present circumstances or to necessity. Peter continues to believe that something much better will come along, and he sees himself as being in a state of temporary exile. Then their pasts begin to haunt them. Peter learns from his friend Mike Burleigh that Sheilah had been a poor child, and her upper-class English accent is revealed as a recent acquisition. We then learn about Peter's own poverty-stricken childhood, for his family's fortune had been squandered by earlier generations. But he will not give in to the truth, "Even in Geneva … he had a manner of strolling to work as if his office were a pastime, and his real life a secret so splendid he could share it with no one except himself."

The past almost literally comes alive in the form of Agnes Brusen, a fellow Canadian coworker. Peter comforts himself in his delusions of importance by ridiculing her as a mole and dismissing her as a child of recent immigrants, someone without class. To his horror, "The others couldn't tell Peter and Agnes apart. There was a world of difference between them, yet it was she who had been brought in to sit at the larger of the two desks." As we learn, her success is the result of her hard work and competence. In his mind Peter is superior to her, the reverse of reality. Peter is a parasite and a fraud; Agnes is a self-made woman. She must be there to spy on him, Peter supposes. Agnes represents everything Peter might have become had he tried instead of expecting to succeed simply by virtue of his name. As so often happens in Gallant's fiction, a character with a fossilized self-image comes face to face with a double or mirror image. Peter realizes that Agnes "was the true heir of the men from Scotland; she was at the start." She is Peter at an earlier stage, but the choices they have made could not be more different.

To the Fraziers' horror Agnes has even achieved social superiority over them, for she has been invited to the parties held by the Burleighs, a couple whom the Fraziers had considered their friends, that is, suitable candidates for their leeching. When Agnes gets drunk at a costume party, Peter helps her home, and during the experience Peter briefly sees the connection between them. They come close to having an affair, but then the connection snaps. Peter draws away from the one true communion he might ever have, returning to his old self-deluding ways.

Two symbols in the story represent the contrast between past ideals and present reality. One is the Balenciaga gown Sheilah holds onto throughout their travels and that symbolizes the elegant past to which she clings. The other is the ice wagon Agnes watched as a child on solitary summer mornings. The wagon represents an ideal, particularly a world of innocence, that is now irretrievably lost. All three characters are exiled from their pasts, and they find comfort only in those brief trips home they can take though their memories.

—Allan Weiss