From Call It in the Air
Seeds of Respectability
By: Gregory Light - Oct 01, 2026
'Hi…’ Joey said when Joanna answered the phone. It was the day after he left her in the Hudson Bay Co. His voice was cheery. He had prepared with cheerful thoughts. George's face after the door knocked him unconscious; Bradley being arrested; Uncle Frederick dropping the baseball on his foot. It worked. He was feeling great. ‘… Dan Spear here,' he said. And that made him laugh.
But it didn’t make Joanna laugh.
Two hours later Joey was still smarting from her response to his phone call. He was tucked up in the Maitland's office in an ageing, three-story walk-up on King Street East. But Joanna's words found him. ('I wish I didn't like you,' was the best thing she had said.) He had tried explaining with humour but under the glare of her censure, the comedy had quickly evaporated. What did she want, anyway? It was the truth. The whole truth. 'Oh, do this dumb sociology thing,' she had ended, 'maybe they can do miracles.' So, a week later, filled with scepticism, Joey went to this ‘dumb sociology thing’, but only, he told himself, to find out what the Maitlands had overheard him say in the cemetery.
CANADA: The Seeds of Respectability was the Maitlands’ consuming passion. Every inch of available wall space in their office had been covered with large squares of cork tile. The project’s data was displayed in neatly ordered rows and columns on thousands of 5 by 7 index cards tacked into the cork. Army battalions. Each card a soldier with its name, rank, and serial number; rank by coloured stars pasted in the lower right-hand corner. These, Graham explained, indicated which ‘cases’ would go into the study, “a qualitative study” he hastened to add. Gold meant it would be used, red likely, blue unlikely and green not. They changed from time to time, promoted or demoted according to constantly revised criteria. The vast majority, Joey noted, were green. “But all of the data will be used in the quantitative analysis”.
The sheer volume of cards conjured up images of suspended coin tosses to Joey; each tick in his notebook enlarged with a name and history. How many rooms would he fill? And what data would he include? What were his underlying assumptions? How could he evaluate a head which sent one man out to mow his lawn and another to walk his dog? Did changes in the patterns of a falling coin echo changes in society? Did a pattern of heads that launched a series of police blows on an evening jogger who just happened to be black say anything profound? Did a rash of tails herald meaning when it let a white accountant off with probation for stealing from a woman’s shelter for which he was supposedly doing pro bono work? “It won’t happen again, your honour.”
Better not take this idea further, Joey thought. Who knows where it might lead? He exhaled silently, not knowing it would lead somewhere. Many years later.
Graham was now standing next to Joey, checking reference numbers on the cards against a thick file of individual accounts in his hand.
'Sorry about the wait,' he said, his fingers shuffling through the file, 'We'll be with you in a few minutes.'
Joey nodded. He was in no hurry. There were other thoughts his head was chasing down. Then a memory of Uncle Frederick popped up. The connection was a green starred card with the alias of "Fred". Joey winced. A memory he hadn't entertained in years returned to say hello.
Uncle Frederick had made a permanent departure from Joey's life when Joey was in grade eight. At least it had seemed permanent at the time. It had been sudden and unexplained. Joey had never been filled in on the details, but from a subdued and cryptic dinner conversation between his mother and father, he discovered it had something to do with an incident in which his uncle had "come out of the closet"; a phrase that Joey only later learned was associated with homosexuality.
A weird tension had fallen over their house during the two weeks immediately following this incident, Joey finding his father particularly strange; alternately submerged in muted waves of confusion, anger, sadness, and embarrassment. It was not, he told Joey's mother, that he believed homosexuality was the sin many thought it was, but rather because, well, somehow, he figured he was partly to blame.
'He is my brother. My flesh and blood. As kids, we did everything together. Football, cowboys and Indians? Do you think it was because I wouldn’t let him be the cowboy?'
'No,' Joey's mother said.
'Or Because I was always the quarterback?'
'Of course not,' she said, patting his hand.
If it had been difficult for Joey's father to get a handle on, the incident was incendiary for Uncle Frederick. It never should have happened he told himself afterwards. Never. But happen it did, late one May night with a perfectly respectable man he had met in a sedate bar on Yonge Street. They had struck up a pleasant and animated conversation that had ended in Frederick accompanying the man back to his apartment for a nightcap. The next morning, terrified and panicking, Joey's uncle lost his highly cherished sense of control and, in an embarrassed rage, erupted, smashing a vase, a clock radio and the bathroom mirror; badly cutting his face in the process. Understandably shaken and worried, his new friend insisted that a deeply apologetic Frederick promise to call him later that night or the next day. When Frederick failed to call during the next week, the man combed through the telephone book, stumbling upon Joey's father. Extremely concerned for Frederick, his troubled inquiry unwittingly yielded enough information to pierce even Joey’s father’s oblivious disposition.
When Joey's father, pale and fearful, finally gathered the nerve to approach his brother, Frederick was inconsolable. He collapsed on the living room carpet, rocking back and forth, his arms over his head, weeping. "It shouldn't have happened. It shouldn't have happened," he repeated over and over and over as he wept. Finally, he admitted to Joey's father that he had known about his homosexuality for many years; 'but I thought I could control it; that I wouldn't ...' he raised his head, '... ever do it.' He looked up at his brother, his washed eyes pitiless and looking for love.
Joey's father closed his eyes and nodded. It was a cruel moment because, however much he tried to force himself to do so, he found he was unable to respond. He wanted to smile, to kneel beside his brother and hug him, to reassure him; something he had done on many occasions without a second thought, but on this occasion, he was utterly incapable of doing so.
In June, three weeks later, Joey's uncle left his job and took up a position teaching mathematics to native children near Kamloops, British Columbia. Thousands of miles away. Joey was elated when he heard the news.
'Boy, those kids don't know what they're in for,' he said to his father the next morning at the breakfast table.
It was the first time his father had ever slapped him. It was also the first time Joey had ever seen his father cry. He told Joey he was sorry and left the kitchen.
'What did I say?' he asked his mother.
'Nothing. Eat your breakfast,' she answered.
Joey knew he had not said ‘nothing’.
Thousands of flips later, Joey's memory now reclaimed his uncle with a degree of sympathy and wistfulness. Held up against the throng of individuals hanging on the Maitland's walls, he reckoned Frederick would do well. If nothing else, the man was respectable. He might easily have been a poster child for the Maitlands study.
Joey shivered. He might have been more impressed by the sheer scale of the Maitland research had he not felt so uneasy about both the subtitle: In Pursuit of the Mediocre (which they claimed was the chief "psychic element" of respectability), and its fundamental assumption that the connection between Canada and respectability was a fact. In the same way that a contemporary study of muggers might shout out New York's parks and subway system, the pursuit of mediocrity "naturally" brought the Maitlands to Canada. Or would have if they were not already here. 'It's a stroke of luck that we're Canadian. Imagine the problems and expenses facing us if we were European or American?' It didn't strike them that their being Canadian might be a factor worth considering. That was a coincidence Joey was loathed to point out. First, it was their baby and secondly, he had this uncanny feeling that every Canadian with a graduate degree made similar assumptions. Although they wouldn't admit it; not in the simmering identity crises of the early 1970s. Perhaps the Maitlands’ attitude was refreshing?
Joey drifted out of his thoughts and into the second room of the office. On a section of cork covering the back wall, he noticed a division of cards labelled "Unevaluated". No star of any colour, they were recent recruits. Still in boot camp. It was there, in the middle of this ungainly group, Joey saw the name, Dan Spear.
'Dan Spear?' The voice had come at night. The middle of the summer.
Joey had been standing near his desk. In his underwear. He was making a mark in a notebook. A maple leaf faced up from the penny on his desk. The telephone receiver rested awkwardly between his shoulder and his ear. A long pause.
'Is that you Dan?'
Joey stopped. The voice was coming from the receiver. Not from his head. The voice asked again. Less certain.
'Dan Spear?'
Gary? Joey blinks. Sinks into a chair. Midsummer night's dream. GARY? The voice is real. It comes beaming through a dense space, hurtling a decade aside. GARY! He was there. On the other end of the telephone line. He said Dan. Gary, who liked to tease him about his nickname, said Dan. He was here. About to borrow his bike. To race him again. Or to joke about going to Texas. Or ... or maybe to explain what happened. To explain why?
'Gary?' Joey asked softly, slowly, tenuously and with emotion. With trepidation, with tears welling in the corner of his eyes. With love.
It wasn't Gary. It couldn't have been. Not from the real world. Not from the world of fact. Of flesh and blood. Of anger. Not from the same world which measured its moves by flips of a penny. Not from that world at all. Impossible! Gary didn't exist there. GARY DIDN'T EXIST!
'Graham,' the voice corrected. 'Graham Maitland.' The fact slammed into Joey's head. 'Is this?'
'How did you get my number?'
'Joanna.' They both answered at the same time.
'Yes,' Graham replied.
After bursting out with Dan's name on the telephone in a gasp of laughter, Joey had told Joanna about Dan Spear. He had also told her that she might get a call for Dan.
'I've already had them. Several.' Joey had made the mistake of laughing again. Joanna was furious. She was finished. She had told Graham three times and Brenda twice (once at four in the morning) that she had never heard of Dan Spear. That they had the wrong number and that she would call the police if they harassed her further. The next call from Graham had come less than a minute after she had curtly rejected Joey's plea to see her that night. She gave Graham Dan's real number.
Dan Spear. Here he was in the flesh so to speak, ingloriously tacked on a wall, memories, associations, and affinities, all haphazardly glued to him like a child's kindergarten paste-up project. The card looked down at Joey sadly. A nothing among a galaxy of stars. It was galling and the fact that it was, made it that much worse. The idea of figuring in the Maitlands’ study was abhorrent to Joey, but there was a part of him that craved gold. At this point he was simply:
NAME: Joey (no sir name supplied)
TEL: (Joanna's had been stroked out and his added)
ADDR: Victoria Residence. U of T.
ALIAS: DAN SPEAR
REF. NO. 01-07-72-397
CHPTS: (No entry)
'No star?' Joey queried nonchalantly.
'You'll have one after the interview,' Graham said. What colour, Joey wanted to ask. 'Then you'll enter this crowd,' Graham continued, sweeping his hand in a wide arc, taking in all the walls of the office.
Joey's eyes meekly followed the hand. In pursuit of the mediocre. What kind of company was he joining? The English-as-a-first-language teacher in Chicoutimi? The Newfoundland pet seal salesman? The Yellowknife real estate agent? The Sudbury landscape gardener? Hardly mediocre. And who was he to join their illustrious company? Who was he? A young, white, Anglo-Saxon, heterosexual, middle-class, protestant, urban male. Overrepresented, in a disreputable study of national character. He paused again. He was also the man Joanna never wanted to see again. “Never again!” That was the last thing she said.
'We're ready for you now,' Graham said, tapping him on the shoulder, a jaunty enthusiasm in his words. 'Sorry for the delay,'
So am I, Joey thought. So am I.