Home Truths (23 page)

He translated everything except
“mûrissent,”
which he could have sworn he had never seen before. He substituted for it “have exploded,” which gave the item some stature. He did not know what he was doing here, unless he was waiting for Katharine to come and find him. In the pension dining room he was the victim of provincial staring, because of his youth and his limp. There came the memory of the months he had spent after his accident completely at the mercy of other people, depending on nurses and resenting it. He had always been active, had lived on decisions; he remembered how his
parents had respected him, let him make his own choices about what he would study and the life he would lead. He ate steadily grated carrots, meat, potatoes, wet salad, gray bread. A bowl of custard was placed beside him. He spooned some of it onto his plate, where it ran everywhere. Since the orgy of caramels sweets disgusted him. He dreaded the mattress in his room, but it was only for a night. In the morning he would take the train to Zurich and from there fly to Berlin. His room there was taken, and his girl had vanished – she was too old for him anyway. “Listen, Sabine,” he had said, “is the guy really a prince?” “No, only his bodyguard. But I ruined it anyway with ‘shalom.’ ” Ramsay laughed. “Is not funny,” Sabine said. She showed him what remained of the railway station where both her parents were killed. “Who cares?” she said, meaning “Do you?”

Two days later he was still there. He looked at the sky, the blue on the horizon, the gray, then the pink. When he entered his room, mist arose outside the window as if it had been lying waiting for him to approach. One night in the dining room he started up from the table, thinking she had come. Katharine in her silk dress could save him from everything mediocre, commonplace, vile, and poor. The room was filled with solemn English couples; the women wore heavy white shoes and yards of stoles. Katharine might enter this room, warm and inquisitive, as if it were a new experience. It was not new: “He used to go for walks and be lost or tired, and then he would get some farmer to ring her.” In the pension dining room, television accompanied their supper. Chairs were arranged so that everyone faced in the same direction. A girl who looked like Sabine lay on a piano and sang. Every few seconds, though the song continued without interruption, the girl wore different
clothes. Now she stood with her hand on the pianist’s shoulder; he looked up into her eyes, and the pair posed that way. The screen went blank, but the sound continued. They listened to a chorus from
West Side Story
, in a foreign language. Everyone looked at the empty, glowing screen, across which sticks and marbles moved, ran together, parted. Faces were lifted, for the set was high on a corner shelf. Again he thought Katharine had arrived. Nothing had happened. The screen had not changed, and the sound was nearly gone.

E
arly in July, in his old room in Berlin, Ramsay opened the letters that had been kept for his return. There was a letter from Katharine, written at the end of May, that must have arrived the day he departed for Switzerland. The great conductor’s widow wrote that now the rain had stopped. She had seen young Italians in spotless shirts hanging about waiting for the cinemas to open – their Sundays were sad. On the promenades, by the lake, in the towns, couples are strolling. The sky changes color; the girls’ white skirts are flattened against their legs. The lake is harsh-looking. The wind shakes the trees. Flower petals are strewn on the grass, and it is like the end of a season instead of the beginning. This was a letter written before she had ever met him. He felt buoyant and lightheaded tearing it to shreds. He was amazed at how simple it became. He was not sure if he had left Sabine, for example, or if she had rejected him. She had said, “Oh, I like you, but now is enough,” spitting grape seed into her palm; but Ramsay had his ticket to Switzerland, bought that very day. What his father would like would be to start again, to arrive at Bonaventure, but how can he? The station is no longer there. “Lamb of
God, Sheep of God,” sings a woman, and the Sally Ann band is nearby. Very attractive, very nostalgic, he said to the remains of Katharine’s letter, but what about the pension and the smell of mediocrity? What about your cook in the kitchen, with frightened eyes? We drove slowly, crawling, because Katharine had seen a white orchis somewhere. Did anyone dare say this was a waste of time? The orchis was a straggly poor thing with sparse anemic flowers.… Surely he had passed a test safely and shown he was immune to the inherited blight?

Only afterward did he think that he might be mistaken, but that day, the day he arrived in Berlin, he was triumphant because he sat with his back to the window and did not know or care what the weather was like outside.

A
bunch of holly hanging upside down at the entrance to her hotel was the first thing Lottie Benz saw in all of Paris that seemed right to her. Even a word like “hotel” was subject to suspicion, since it was attached to a black façade in no way distinguished from the rest of the street. The people walking on the street did not look as if they had sisters or brothers or childhood friends, and their clothes and haircuts in no manner indicated to her a station in life. The New Look had spread from this place, but none of the women appeared to have given it a thought. As for the men, alike in their gray raincoats, only their self-absorbed but inquisitive faces kept them from seeming unemployed. Lottie, whose mother had made the
dress she was wearing from a Vogue pattern, could have filled the back seat of her taxi with polka dots, the skirt was so wide. Stepping down, she shook order into the polka dots and her mother’s ankle-length Persian-lamb coat, lent for the voyage. That was when she saw the holly. Even as the taxi-driver plucked every bit of change from her outstretched hand, she turned to this one familiar thing. A city that knew about holly would know about Christmas, true winter, everything.

That day, which was Tuesday, December 9, 1952, was laid on with a light brush. The street had been cut out of charcoal-colored paper with extremely fine scissors. Lottie had come here out of a tempest of snow. She drew a breath of air that seemed mild – her first breath of Paris. It swept into her lungs and was immediately converted into iron. She withdrew her hand, relieved of its francs, and pressed it against her chest.

Two boys passed her, walking in step, without a glance at Lottie stranded, the taxi grinding out and away, or the bags the driver had dumped upon the curb. One boy said to the other, in an American accent, “If people depress you, why do you bother seeing them?” The iron weight shifted as she bent to pick up her suitcases. An old man in porter’s uniform watched Lottie through the frosted glass door. His eye appeared as part of the pattern of lilies etched on the glass, and then his nose. He consented to hold open the door. Lottie offered him a tip, which he pocketed. She had been advised to tip for consideration, however slight, no matter how discourteously shown. In a place where Americans were said to be hated because of the Korean War, she intended to put up a show for her own country, which was Canada. She smiled. The hotel, or France, personified by the woman at the desk with frizzy red hair, did not care. Lottie conveyed with a second smile that it was of no importance.

For the first time in her life she was compelled to put her name to a police questionnaire. Bending over the form, she wrote “Charlotte Maria,” and wanted to put “Lottie” in brackets, but there was no room. Her home address – the Princess Pat Apartments, in Winnipeg – also seemed to want explaining. She could have written reams of explanation about everything, had there been space. She imagined a policeman reading her answers attentively. Next to “Profession” she wrote “none yet.” The woman with frizzy hair made her cross this out and write “student” in its place. Lottie gave up the questionnaire, and with it her new blue passport.

Three messages awaited her. First, a letter from her mother, written four days before Lottie left home. Though sent with loving intention, so that Lottie would have news the instant she arrived, it contained no news. As for Kevin, he had cabled, “
MISS YOU ALREADY LOVE
,” a few hours after her plane took off. Supposing he discovered twenty hours later that he did not miss her at all? She examined the cable gravely. The last message was from a girl named Vera Rodna. It welcomed Lottie to Paris, and gave a telephone number. Upstairs, in her ice-cold, beige-colored hotel room, Lottie tore all three messages across, then found there was no wastebasket.

A sunbeam revealed dust on the window and dust on the floor but, curiously, none in the air. (Perhaps in this place they deliberately allowed dust to settle. Was this better? Better for Lottie – for her asthma, her chronic bronchitis, her fragile lungs?) The bed, the cupboard containing a washbasin, the wardrobe that contained one bent wire hanger were all clean. There were no pillows, window shades, towels, or drinking glass. There were any number of mirrors, however, evenly shaded with dust, and velvet curtains that she accepted as luxurious.

Wondering why she was noticing so much, checking herself lest she become introspective or moody, she remembered that this was the first time she had ever been anywhere alone. The notes she was taking mentally were for future letters – the first to Dr. Keller, her thesis director, the second most likely for Kevin. She unpacked her new cake of Palmolive, her toothbrush, her unworn dressing gown with rose-pink petal neckline. A hot bath, she learned, from a notice posted on the back of the door, would cost three hundred and sixty francs, which was more than a dollar. Lottie was to live on a Royal Society scholarship, supplied out of Canadian funds frozen abroad. Any baths from now on would be considered pampering. She intended to profit from this winter of opportunities, and was grateful to her country for having provided it, but in no sense did she desire to change or begin a new life.

By Sunday the weather in the street was the weather of spring. The iron of the first breath had disintegrated, vaporized. At the bottom of her lungs was a pool of mist. She reminded herself that back home the day had not begun. The city she had left was under snow, ransacked by wind, and on the dark side of the globe. She was not homesick.

Vera Rodna, whose message had so quickly been turned into paper scrap, came to the hotel one day when Lottie was visiting the “Mona Lisa.” She left a new letter, this time asking Lottie to come to lunch and she indicated the restaurant with a great X on a map.
“Une jeune fille très élégante,”
the frizzy redhead down at the desk remarked. Lottie had to smile at that. No one here could know that Vera was only a girl from Winnipeg who had flunked out of high school and, on a suspicion of pregnancy, been shipped abroad to an exile without glamour. Some of the men in her family called themselves Rodney, and at least
one was in politics. End syllables had been dropped from the name in any case, to make it less specifically Ukrainian. Vera had big hands and feet, a slouching walk, a head of blond steel wool. The nose was large, the eyes green and small. She played rough basketball, but also used to be seen downtown, Sunday-dressed, wearing ankle-strap shoes. Vera had made falsies out of a bra and gym socks – there were boys could vouch for it. In cooking class it turned out that she thought creamed carrots were made with real cream. She didn’t know what white sauce was because they had never eaten it at home. That spoke volumes for the sort of home it must be.

Lottie accepted Vera’s invitation, though there was no real reason for them to meet. Having been raised in the same city did not give them a common past. Attempting to impose a past, beginning with a meal in a restaurant, Vera would not establish herself as a friend from home, if that was what she was trying to do. But Vera, being Ukrainian, and probably no moron in spite of her scholastic and morals records, would have enough sense to know this.

The restaurant was an Italian place on the Rue Bonaparte. Wavy, sooty dust masked the wall paintings except for a corner where someone had been at work with a sponge. There Vera waited, backed up by frothing geraniums and blue-as-laundry-bluing seas. Ashes, Sunday papers, spilled cigarettes, and bread crumbs gave her table the look of an unswept floor. Vera’s eyes tore over Lottie, head to foot, gardenia hat to plastic overshoes. She said, in a full voice that all at once became familiar and a second later had never been forgotten, “Well, this is great. Sit down.”

“This is very nice,” said Lottie neutrally.

“It’s not bad. I’ve tried most of them.”

Lottie had not meant the restaurant but the occasion of their meeting. Vera began to wave at a waiter and also to talk. She sloshed wine from a bottle that was nearly empty into a glass that seemed none too clean, and pushed this at Lottie. “Some rich bastard’s Chambertin,” she said. “Might as well lap up the dregs.”

Lottie lifted the glass and sipped, and put it down forever, having shown she was game. She said, “How did you know I was in Paris, Vera?”