Home Truths (20 page)

T
he first night Ramsay spent in the pavilion a large moth brushed against his face. He knew it would not bite or sting, but its touch was pure horror, and his reaction uncontrolled. The moth was paper-white until it blundered against the pillow, and then he saw it was cream. Indigo eyes were painted upon its wings. He shot XEX out of the blue can Katharine had left for mosquito-killing. The battle the moth put up for its life now frightened him witless. It flapped its way under the bed. The frantic wings were louder than his heart. During the fight, scores of incidental casualties – gnats, midges, spiders,
flies – dropped from the ceiling. He was afraid to open the window or the glass doors in case any more creatures came in, and he lay in the poisoned room blowing his nose all night long. He was on a mattress of straw that was just slightly too short. He was covered with tons of eiderdown. In his mind he had an image of his mended bones beginning to slip. If he got up now, he would not be able to stand. He could see, in moonlight, the paved terrace and the chair that had been the old man’s. The pavilion was like another beehive, and the old man had been sent here, with a curé’s bed and a doll’s piano, and told something: “You will be alone in eternity.” “Don’t eat sweets.” “If you think you are dying, ring that bell.”

At a quarter to six the sunlight on the wall made a stately shadow of the roses. The sun was smaller than a marble. Hills and trees received its light at an angle that made them a single spongy substance. Birds were shrieking. Ramsay pulled the eiderdown up to his eyes, which left his feet bare. When he woke up two hours after this, he took inventory of the roses; there were four yellow, two pale pink, and two garnet, which were dying. These were probably sensitive – like him – to XEX. He had nothing better to do than count by color; he was in the grip of believing that he would fail, that he was ungifted, that his crushed body would betray him, and that the years of his life – fifteen out of twenty – involved with music were a waste. He had a premonition that he would be the victim of an inherited fault. His father should help him now. His father had willed his existence: he existed in his father’s mind from the moment his father knew he had survived the Dieppe raid in the last war. This extra time, when Ramsay existed in desire, gave him a margin of safety. He felt as if he had been given a present of time; no one else had this.
He would outlive everyone. Moser had wanted to be outlived. His father was better than Moser. His father would never have whimpered and breathed through a scarf. His father had a calm, closed, gentle disposition. Patience and endurance distinguished his face, which otherwise might have seemed boyish. If only his father had not depended on love, or on an ideal of what a woman must mean in his life; if only he had not been implicitly certain he could expect only good of women, that love was the constant survivor; if only he had let his wife leave him when she wanted to – but then, what about Ramsay? After his accident, his father had put something in a letter that he was too reserved to say when he came to see Ramsay in the hospital. (Where had he written the letter, and how had he slipped it out to the mail? From his office, probably. Ramsay’s mother, having once tried to cast his father away, was now devoutly jealous – a wastebasket hunter, letter filcher, telephone spy. She thought his father’s pocket diary was written in code.) His father wrote, “I suppose two things have bedevilled our life. First, that I am hideously shy and totally lacking inwardly in any confidence. Second (and this is fact, not fiction), that I’ve puzzled and puzzled over what happened in 1942, over the hundred-million-to-one shot that landed me back among living people when I had joined the dead. The greatest denial of death is to love as I always shall love you and your mother.” Ramsay was too weak and too ill when he read it. He began to cry. They kept feeding him answers when he hadn’t asked for anything. He would never say (though he thought it), “You both make me sick.” There was still the early admiration for his father – not only for his unfaltering conduct but because of a childhood illusion that his father could, for example, look at the engine of a car and see what was wrong
with it. And there was more – the conspiracy of two quiet men living in the same house with an intolerant woman.

As the sun above the dying spruce expanded, rose, became too brilliant to see, Ramsay surveyed his father’s life and found it simple. “I love you” or “I don’t love you” seemed puerile. His father had never had to cope – as Ramsay was doing – with doubts and terror and the possibility of lapsed genius. He had not even had to cope with a lot of women – only that one.

O
wing to an exchange concluded with the enemy, Ramsay’s father came back to Montreal about a year before the end of the war. He was part of a contingent of sick, wounded, and tubercular prisoners taken at Dieppe. Bonaventure Station received him. This was a dusty building with, on both the front and the back, a wooden porch that is called, in Montreal, a gallery. The paint on the gallery was scrofulous and diseased, and the station itself was the dark dry red that deflates the soul. It was at the foot of a steep hill; streetcars stopped before it after an awkward turn. For a long time the station had been used only for freight traffic, and then the Army took it over entirely. The Army put up cardboard squares with the letters of the alphabet so the next of kin would know where to wait, and assigned dozens of men to make sure the next of kin did not trample one another to death. Ramsay’s mother was twenty-one. She sat under R for Ramsay the better part of a day, with her hands in the pockets of her camel-hair coat and her bare brown-painted legs stuck out straight before her. Ramsay knew, because she had told him, that there were no nylon stockings in those days, and that she wore her coat on a blazing hot day because of a guilty and confused desire to
cover up. The men came through a door at the far end of the station, one by one. His father appeared; swung his kit down from his shoulder; stared into the dark. It was like a monkey house by then, with the dirt of the place, and the stopped-up toilets, and the children frightened, and the women screaming. She pushed her way up to him and with her fists in her pockets said, “I don’t want to live with you. I don’t want to be married at all. I couldn’t tell you while you were a prisoner. Anyway the censor might not have let it through.” Some women took their husbands home and lay like corpses so the husbands could see for themselves the marriage was over, but Ramsay’s mother wouldn’t have that. She was fiercely honest and saw nothing the matter with manslaughter. In the slow-motion film of someone else’s memory, Ramsay saw his father there, home, alive, yes, but in a sense never seen or heard of again. His father was Canadian-silent, Canadian-trained, and had to make an intellectual effort not to be proud. He struggled out of the station and walked up the hill beside his wife and sat down with her on a bench in Dominion Square. A Salvation Army band played “Lamb of God, Sheep of God,” which was taken up by a drunk woman sharing their bench. His father was so stunned, so exhausted, he forgot his name. He forgot what he was doing here – forgot the name of his native city. His wife said he would be an invalid all his life. He heard her say she hated sick people, and had married too young. Yet at the end of the afternoon she led him home and turned out the girl whose apartment she shared. Why? Pity, she told Ramsay. No, said his father; it was justice, the power of love. Bonaventure Station was destroyed before Ramsay could see it. Most of the buildings his father and mother looked at when they were deciding his existence or nonexistence stand
only on old postcards and in their account of that day. The bed belonged to the girl turned temporarily out of the flat, and no one knows what became of her. She married some man, said Ramsay’s mother, and they left Montreal.

K
atharine Moser, companion of genius, generator of talent, dispenser of comfort, and mind reader as well, said, without leading up to it, “I suppose you were close to your mother?” They were in the car, and she was driving him he did not know quite where – to fetch drinking water from a spring, she said.

“I was closer to my father, actually” – this reluctantly. He pinched his lips together, for he had in his pocket one of his mother’s long, self-justifying letters, jumpy with dates: “In January 1946,” “Just after the Korean War,” “When we met at Bonaventure” – that was the important date, when he was not conceived, was not present, was not even deaf, blind, and upside down. She defeated him by making him present on that occasion. He was still her witness, as if she had wanted nothing more than a witness. He saw her belted coat, her curly hair brushing the collar, her straight bare legs. He was afraid of contamination; his father’s sweetness, his gentleness were in the blood. He knew – because many times told – how she had been persuaded. Victory for the man! Yet it was she who stood up abruptly, slung her handbag over her shoulder, and took him home to bed.

“You are so quiet – you live in music, I can see that,” said Katharine, driving. “Do you have” – she sounded eighty-five and senile to him now – “time for girls?”

He had slept badly, and his legs were too long for the Mini-Minor. He edged slowly around so that he was facing her
profile and, after the second’s reflection in which he decided not to say, “Mind your own damn business,” he suddenly told her about Sabine. He handed over Sabine, the slut, the innocent, the admirer of her own body, the good-natured, the stupid, the avaricious, the maker and seeker of love. The first woman he had spent a whole night with became an anecdote. He said, “Finally, she met an Arab prince. I mean a real one, in skirts. Jewelled dagger. He gave her some crappy bracelets that probably came from Hong Kong. She was excited. Every time you’d see her she’d be trying to write him a letter. But she made an awful mistake. When he left Berlin she said, ‘Well,
shalom.
’ She thought it was a kind of Middle Eastern ‘Ciao.’ You know what the Arab said? He said, ‘That’s not exactly us.’ ” Ramsay’s laughter was loud.

“And that wiped her out as a wife for you? Her
bêtise?”

“I’m not looking for a
wife.”
He wondered if she knew he was twenty and would have to live for a long time on grants and on the allowance his father gave him.

“Creative men should marry young. It stabilizes them.”

What was she getting at? He looked at her calm profile, at her competent hands. She had the habit of opening and closing her hands as she drove, and slightly lifting her foot, so that the car, for a fraction of time, had to drive itself – though never long enough to take them off the road. He muttered about affinities and someone whose interests, whose mind and background …

“That’s not marriage,” said Katharine impatiently. “You didn’t sleep with Sabine for her mind and background. Moser did his best work after he married me. I brought him back to the country, where he belonged. I made his life calm and easy, and kept him close to nature.”

Owing to a mistake in time, he was having a conversation with a very young girl who was somehow old enough to be his mother.

“I would have thought that anything Moser did was separated from nature,” he said. “He would have been what he was in a hotel room. In jail.”

“Without the wind in the trees and the larks?”

Ramsay reflected that these had probably been a nuisance. Katharine’s letters had been intelligent; she had used another vocabulary. If she had talked about the wind and larks, he would never have come. “I’ve explained it all wrong,” he said, though he thought he had not. “I mean that everything he did was intellectual. He was divorced from nature by intention. Now do you see?”

“Nothing can be divorced from nature and survive.” She looked angry, creased suddenly. He saw how she would be fifteen years from now. “Look at what has happened to music. To painting. It is the fault of people like you.”

He should have let it go, but he was angry too. Who was she to attack him? She had invited him here; he had not arrived like a baby on the doorstep. When the old man died, Ramsay had written a polite and thoughtful letter to his widow, in care of the Swiss nation, and had been surprised to receive a warm embrace of an answer, in English.
She
had kept on writing;
she
had – the fine, and humorous, and courageous hospital nurse. (He forgot how it had pleased him, for once in his life, to play up to a situation, to pretend it was not over his head, to show off his opinions, pretending all the while to be diffident – to gather favor, to charm.)

If, at this moment, she was thinking, You are not what I expected, she was to blame. She was ignorant of music. She
was the persistent artists’ friend who inspires nothing but a profound lack of gratitude. He was feeling it now. He said, “Painters learn to paint by looking at pictures, not at hills and valleys, and musicians listen to music, not the wind in the trees. Everything Moser said and wrote was unnatural. It was unnatural because he was sophisticated.” Her head shot round, and to her blazing eyes he said, bewildered, “It is a compliment.”

They drove on in a silence that presently became unbearable. “Very soon it’s too late,” his mother had remarked, of quarrels. Her staccato letter jumped through his mind: “I said if you can’t take a holiday when I need one I had better go without you. I shall go where there are plenty of men, I promise you that. He said, Go where you like my darling. I said, A woman like me shouldn’t travel alone. I must have bitched up my life. He had the gall to say, All right I agree you’ve bitched it up but it wasn’t all my fault. I was driving and I felt his crippled existence beside me and I thought mine might not be better. The weather is beautiful as it always is in Montreal when he is being impossible. There must be more accidents more murders more nervous breakdowns more hell in October and June. Where was I? Oh yes. When I got out of the car I saw he was crying. Pity for himself? Guilt over me?”

All at once Katharine parked sharply. Reaching behind her for a basket of empty bottles that had been rattling on the floor, she said (smiling to show they were friends again), “Is it true you have never seen a spring?” In an evil grotto a trickle of water squeezed out of the rock. A mossy stone pipe rested on the edge of a very old bathtub and dispensed a stream that overflowed the tub and ran deviously along a bed of stones, under a stone bridge, and out of sight. They stood, she worshipping, he
blinking merely, each crowned with a whirling wreath of gnats. “I
own
this source,” she said, and to his horror she immersed the bottles one by one in the tub. She filled each with typhoid fever, conjunctivitis, amoebic dysentery, blood poisoning, and boils. She capped them, smiling all the while, and put them back dripping in the basket; the basket was packed in the car, and they drove away.