Home Truths (24 page)

“My mother, from my sister Frannie. Fran’s in your father’s math-and-Latin. She’s smart – makes up for me.”

The name Frannie Rodna conveyed nothing, and Lottie accepted with some pride and some melancholy that she was now part of an older crowd.

“By the way, what are you doing here, exactly?” Vera asked. She was dressed in a black-and-brown checked cape, and a wool hat pulled straight down to her eyebrows. She may have been quite smart by local standards, which undoubtedly she knew about by now, but Lottie could not help thinking how hunkie she looked. Vera’s crocheted gloves fell off the table. Her hands looked as if they could easily deal with the oilier parts of a motorbike. “Whadja say?” said Vera, after fishing round for her gloves.

“I
said
, Vera, that my
professor
, Dr.
Keller
, is
from
Alsace, and that’s the reason I’m going there. My thesis is about the integration of minority groups without a loss of ethnic characteristics.”

“Come again?” Vera’s elbows were planted in ashes and crumbs. She turned from Lottie to deal with the waiter, and ordered an unknown something on Lottie’s behalf.

“Like at home,” Lottie said, when the waiter had left. “Vera, you do know. That’s the strength of Canada, that it hasn’t been
a melting pot. Everybody knows that. The point is, I’m taking it as a good thing. Alsace is an example in an older civilization. With Dr. Keller’s contacts in Strasbourg … Vera, don’t stare just on purpose; I do find it unpleasant. I’ll give you a simple example. Take the Poles.” Delicacy with regard to Vera’s possible feelings prevented her saying Ukrainians. “The Poles paint traditional Easter eggs. Right? They stop doing it in the States after one generation, two at most. In Canada they never stop. Now do you see?”

Vera was listening to this open-mouthed. Lottie felt she had sounded stupid, yet the idea, a favorite of Dr. Keller’s, was not stupid at all. She knew it was a theory, but she was taking it for granted that it could be applied. If it could not, let Vera prove it. Vera closed her mouth, drew her lips in between her teeth, let go her breath, and when all that was accomplished said, “You crazy or something?”

“Think whatever you like.”

“Do you even know what a minority is?”

“I ought to,” said Lottie, and she took the bread and began peeling off the crust, after cracking its surface with her nails.

“You don’t. It was always right to be what
you
are.”

“Oh, was it, now?”

An explanation for Lottie’s foolishness suddenly brightened Vera’s face. She clasped her hands, her big mechanic’s hands, and cried, “Keller’s in love with you! He’s meeting you in Alsace.”

“He’s got a wife and everything. Children, I mean. Honestly, Vera!”

“I think everybody’s in love,” said Vera, and indeed looked as if she thought so. “Who is it, then? Still Kevin?”

“Yes, still.”

“You’re going to be away, in Alsace or someplace? That’s taking a chance.” She seemed to be fumbling over something in her mind, perhaps a memory of Kevin. “I guess you needn’t worry,” she said. “You’ve kept him on the string since you were sixteen. You’ll bring it off.”

“What do you mean, Vera, ‘bring it off’?”

Vera looked as if Lottie should know what she meant. A platter of something strange was placed between them. Vera dug into a bone full of marrow, extricated the marrow, and spread it over a mound of rice. It might have been dog food.

“Delicious,” said Vera with her mouth full. “Know one thing I remember, Lottie? You used to choose the meals at home, and your brothers had to eat whatever you happened to like. That’s what they told around, anyway.”

Lottie, surprised at Vera’s knowing about this, said, “Everybody favors girls.”

“Boy, my father didn’t,” said Vera. “He kind of respects me now, though. Your father used to scare me even more than my own. His voice was just a squeak when he got mad. You could hear every word, but the voice was up around the ceiling. When he told my father I wasn’t college material, and not even high-school material, his voice sounded artificial. You take after him a little, but your voice just gets slower and slower. Your father was a fine man, all the same. Old Captain Hook.”

Mr. Benz had been called Captain Hook by his pupils, but there was a further matter, which Vera did not mention – Captain von Hook. That was an old wartime joke. You would have thought the mean backwash of war could never have reached them there, in the middle of another country.

Lottie said with slow care, “How is your brother, Vera, the
one who went into politics? Wasn’t there some kind of row about him? Honest Stan Rodney?”

“Honest slob. Listen, what are you doing over Christmas? I’m going to Rome. I’ve got this friend there. He’s from home, but you don’t know him. He’s a Pole. Far as I know, he doesn’t paint any Easter eggs. I used to think he was a spy, but he turned out to be a teacher. Slav lit.
When
he’s working. Boy, the trouble
he
gets into.” Vera’s admiration for the trouble made her go limp. “Do you want to do something in Paris before I go? See a play or something? You’ve been up the Eiffel Tower, I suppose. I like going up and looking down. You see this shadow like a kind of basket, when there’s any sun. There’s Versailles and that. Euh, Fontainebleau … boring. Katherine Mansfield’s grave, how about that? Remember Miss Pink? She fed us old Mansfield till it ran out of our ears. She’s buried around Fontainebleau. Mansfield is, not Miss Pink.” Vera laughed with her mouth wide.

“She was my favorite author until I specialized,” said Lottie primly. “Then, I’m sorry to say, I had to restrict my reading.”

Vera dug into her rice as if looking for treasure. “Right,” she said. “We’ll go out to the grave.” Lottie consented to nothing of the kind.

V
era must have mistaken Lottie’s silent refusal, for the next Saturday, at half past ten, she turned up while Lottie was still in bed.

Lottie had been out with a cousin of Kevin’s, who worked at the Embassy. He had made her pay for her own drinks, as if they were still students having cafeteria coffee. Lottie was
puzzled by the bar he took her to, full of youngish American men, and even more by the hateful, bitter singer at the piano. Kevin’s cousin seemed to feel that she had no right to criticize anything, having only just arrived, though he himself never stopped complaining. His landlord was swindling him; he was sick of dark rooms and gas heaters. He blamed Paris for its size. Until now he had lived in a house, never in a flat. His accent shot from one extreme of broad vowels to the opposite. He did not want to sound American but looked it. In the bar full of crew cuts, he matched any one of them except in assurance. Toward the end of the night, he began bemoaning his own Canadian problems of national identity, which Lottie thought a sign of weakness in a man. Moreover, she learned nothing new. What he was telling her was part of Dr. Keller’s course in Winnipeg Culture Patterns. She had wasted the government’s money and her own time.

Vera said she was leaving for Rome, which she called Roma, any minute. Slumped over an ashtray on the foot of Lottie’s bed, she urged an excursion to Fontainebleau. It was a lovely sunny day – just the weather for visiting graveyards. Sleepy and pale, caught with curlers in her hair, Lottie rose and dressed, turning her back. Vera scarcely allowed her time to brush her teeth. They were doomed to catch, and they caught, the Lyon noon express. The train was filled with
hommes d’affaires
, who had all the seats. Lottie stood crushed against a window, looking at the backs of towns. She was cold, and speechless with hunger. After Melun she began to feel calmer, and less hungry and unwashed. Trees such as she had never seen before, and dense with ivy, met and glided apart in the winter light. Touching the window, she felt a thin cool film of sunlight. The ivy shone and suddenly darkened, as if a shutter
had been swung to. Lottie forgot she had asthma, chronic colds, low blood pressure, and that Vera would regret this.

“I always thought I was going to die at the same age as Mansfield,” she remarked to Vera. “I may still.”

“Not the same way.”

“At my age, you already know what you’re going to die of.” Lottie was thirteen months older than Vera, who would be twenty-one in February. Unspecified illnesses of a bronchial nature had kept Lottie out of school for months on end. A summer grippe only last August had prevented her coming over here in September.

“You used to wear those hand-smocked dresses,” Vera suddenly chose to recall.

“A friend of Mother’s made them,” said Lottie, and closed a door on that with her tone of voice. Though ignominiously clothed then, she had been small for her age, and almost unnoticeable in the classes of children younger than herself. She skipped grades, catching up, passing, but no one praised her. They said Captain Hook had helped.

Vera explained her commitment to Mansfield, which was an old crush on Miss Pink. It had led Vera to read this one writer when she never read anything else, or wanted to. Now that she was away from the Miss Pinks of this world, she read all the time.

Lottie’s transparent reflection was ivy green. “Do you think I look weak?” she asked, meaning that she wanted her health kept in mind.

Vera, who was tall, caught Lottie’s face at an angle Lottie had never seen. “Weak, in a way,” she said, “but not frail.” Lottie’s reflection went smug. Vera, squinting down and sideways, looked as if she thought weakness could not account for everything.

When they alighted at the station, Vera consulted a taxi-driver, whose head was a turtle’s between muffler and cap. Showing off in French, she seemed to think the driver would think she was French and take them to a gem of a restaurant. Lottie felt cold and proud. She would not mention her low blood pressure. Actually, she was supposed to drink tea or coffee almost the minute she wakened; her mother usually brought it to her in bed. She had never fainted, but that was not to say she never would. Their driver rushed them up a dirt road and abandoned them before a billboard upon which was painted in orange “
RESTAURANT – BAR – DOLLARS ACCEPTED – PARKING.”

“We aren’t going to like it,” said Vera. “He took you for an American.” Nevertheless, she rushed Lottie onward, through a room where an American soldier slept in a leather armchair, past a bar where more soldiers sat as if Saturday drinking were a cheerless command, and into a totally empty dining room that smelled of eggs frying. Not empty: out of the dim corner where he was counting empty bottles came the proprietor of the place, unshaven, clad in an American gabardine. His thick eyelids drooped; he had already seen enough of Vera and Lottie. Vera was tossing her scarf and her cape and saying chummily, “Just an omelette, really – we aren’t at all hungry,” and then they were in a small room, and the door to the room shut behind them. Here ashes and orange peel spilled out of a cold grate. Three tables pushed against the wall were barricaded behind armchairs, an upright piano, dining chairs, and a cheval glass. The two girls pulled a table and chairs clear and sat down. Lottie had a view of a red clay tennis court strung with Christmas lights. She turned to see what Vera was staring at. Another table was taken, but the noise and confusion
coming from it at first seemed part of the chaos in the room. Lottie now saw two American soldiers and two adolescent girls who might be their wives. One of the girls, the prettier of the two, cried out, “But tell me now, am I talking loud? Because I sound to myself like I am talking loud.” The laughter from the others was a kettledrum, and Lottie and Vera displayed their first pathetic complicity:
“We
aren’t Yanks,” said the look they exchanged.

Dissociating herself and perhaps Lottie from the noisy four, Vera gave their waitress a great smile and a skyrocket of French.
“On n’a que ça, les Américains,”
said the waitress, shrugging. Vera’s flashy French, her flashy good will did not endear her. Lottie watched the waitress’s face and understood: she didn’t like them, either. When Vera praised the small neat lighter she kept in her apron pocket, the waitress said,
“C’est un briquet, tout simplement.”
She served a tepid omelette on cold plates and disappeared into a more interesting region, whence came the sound of men’s voices. Lottie and Vera sat on, forgotten.

Vera said, “There should be a thing on the table you could hit that would go cling, cling.”

“A bell,” said Lottie, taken in. “The thing is a bell.”

“I
know. I was showing you how Al talks.” Smoking, Vera told about walks in Roma and meals when she and her Polish friend from home had nothing to eat but hard-as-a-rock cheese. Once, he gave his share to a dog.

“Are you hard up for money, Vera?” Lottie did not mean by this she had any to lend.

“No, not really. But I sort of am when I’m with him. I pretend not to have any at all and live the way he does.” Vera was bored; she was always quickly bored. Blowing smoke all
over Lottie, she began defending the four Americans. “You’ve never seen how abominable Canadians can be.”

Americans could be trained to set an example, Lottie insisted. They should be loved. Who was to blame if they were not?

Vera mashed her cigarette out on her plate. “D’you know how Canadian soldiers used to cut the Germans’ throats?” she said. “Al showed me. You push the helmet like this,” and she reached across quick as a snake and pressed the long helmet Lottie Benz would have been wearing had she been a soldier into the nape of her neck and drew her forefinger under Lottie’s chin.

Lottie understood that an attempt had been made against her life and that she was safe. She said, “I love my country, Vera, and even if I didn’t I wouldn’t run it down.”

“I’m not running it down. I’m telling you stories.”

The bill was nineteen hundred francs. Vera said it was grossly excessive. “They took you for an American,” she said. “It’s those damned overshoes.”

The air outside smelled of earth and eternally wet leaves, as though this place were unmindful of seasons. At the end of a walled lane the walled graveyard was a box. The sky (the sun was covered up now) was the lid. Lottie was still disturbed by Vera’s attack. She knew if you show nothing, eventually you feel nothing; presently, feeling nothing, she was just herself, a visitor here – not a guest, because she was paying her way. She walked a pace or two behind Vera, who had taken on a serious and rather reproachful air, sniffing at rusty iron crosses, shaking her head beside a fresh grave covered over with planks. At the only plot of grass in the cemetery, she stopped and
announced that this was it. A brownish shrub had been clipped so that it neatly surrounded a stone bench. Someone – now, in December – had planted a border of yellow pansies. Vera, stalking dramatically in her cape, left Lottie to think her thoughts. A restless pilgrim, she slashed at weeds with her handbag and all at once called, “It’s not where you are, Lottie. It’s over here.” Lottie rose slowly from the bench, where she had not been thinking about Katherine Mansfield but simply nursing her several reasons for not feeling well. Where Vera stood, a block of polished granite weighed upon a block still larger. The base was cemented to the ground.