Home Truths (27 page)

This composed, but not written, Lottie dragged herself
from her bed and down the rose-papered hall to Vera’s room, on an impulse, to say something like “You were kind,” but Vera’s door was locked. She thought she heard Vera whispering to someone – or else she heard the curtains moving, or the rustle of the papers Vera kept on her window sill.

“Even when I am nice to Vera,” she finished the letter, “it doesn’t mean anything, because I don’t honestly like her.”

Vera had complained about the washbasin and then proceeded to the post office to collect her mail. She and Lottie were both using poste restante, because they thought the Quai des Bateliers was temporary. Lottie wanted to get into a students’ residence where she would meet interesting people, and Vera was waiting for Al. Vera came back from the post office with a picture of Al. He was in Paris now – he seemed to be approaching in stages and halts, like a traveller in an earlier century – and had sent, along with his photograph, a letter full of requests and instructions. Lottie looked at a round face and enormous dark eyes with fixed, staring pupils. He seemed drugged or startled. “His eyes are blue,” said Vera. “They look dark with that fancy lighting. I’ve been out to the refugee college, asking around. He’s got it all wrong. It’s only a dorm. They go to the university for classes. It sounded funny in the first place, teaching Slav lit to Slavs. Maybe he’s found something else to do. Or not to do, more like it. He’s got in with some Poles who live outside Paris and do weaving. They may also have prayer and patriotic evenings. Right Wing Bohemia,” said Vera, looking down her large nose, “lives in the country and weaves its own skirts.
You
know.” Over Lottie’s cringing mind crept the fear that Vera might be some sort of radical. Ukrainians were extreme one way or another. You would have to know which of the Uke papers Vera’s parents subscribed to,
and even that wouldn’t help unless you could read the language. “Get this,” said Vera, and, adopting a manner Lottie assumed must be Al’s, she read aloud, “ ‘You cannot imagine what a change it is for me – yesterday
le grand luxe
in Roma, today here. But I must say, even though I have the palate of a gourmet, I find nothing wrong with the cooking.’ ”

“He just doesn’t sound Canadian,” Lottie said.

“In the evening the old man came to my room,” composed Lottie, introducing the old man to Kevin without warning. “He stood in the doorway, with his battered face and his one eye, and said, ‘I am going to write a poem about Canada in honor of you and your friend Mademoiselle Vera. In which city is there a street called Saint-Jean-Louis?’ ”

“In the first place,” Lottie had said earnestly, “is there any such saint?”

“Could it be in Winnipeg?” the old man said.

“No, Quebec.” She recalled crooked streets, and one street where the houses were frozen and old; over the top of a stone wall had bloomed a cold spring tree.… But I was never in Quebec, she remembered next.

There was no transition from day to night. She heard him typing, like someone dropping china beads one by one. She coughed, and put the pillow over her face. If he comes in and talks about the poem again, she thought, it might make me homesick. If something made me homesick I might cry, and that could break the fever. If something could make me homesick, I would go home and not wait for someone to come and fetch me. But when she wanted to think of home, she thought of a church in Quebec, and a dark recess where the skull of General Montcalm, preserved by Ursuline nuns, and exposed by them, rested in a gold-and-glass cage. But I have never seen
it – someone described it to me. It has nothing to do with home. Her eyes filled with tears, but not of homesickness.

A mounting litter of paper handkerchiefs and empty yogurt jars spilled out of the paper carton Vera had put beside Lottie’s bed. “À
quoi bon?”
said the hotel maid when Lottie asked her to empty the box. The maid was not obliged to clean a room unless the tenant went out. It was a rule. Bribed, she said she would see about the washbasin but nothing more.

Lottie wanted to give the old man something better than an imaginary street for his poem, but now the idea of a city she had not seen obscured her memory. “What, do you mean you were never there?” he might ask if she told him she had never been to Quebec. “It was a tremendous excursion,” she would have to say. “Nobody over here knows how far it was, or how much it would have cost,” and tears of self-pity followed the others.

Bonzo, the hotel dog, stole under the bed and tore to pieces a box of matches. Lottie had lost her voice. She whispered, “Bad dog!” and “You’ll make yourself very sick!” and on her hands and knees retrieved a slimy piece of wood. She had a high fever now. She knew it by the trouble she had getting back into bed – she could not judge its height – and she saw it reflected on the face of the nurse who had been summoned by Vera. The nurse, a peasant girl in a soiled head scarf, twin sister to the maid in appearance, told Lottie what her temperature was, in a disapproving voice. It was in centigrade and meant nothing.

“
Ma voisine!”
cried the old man, standing in the hall. “It is very warm outside, so warm that one can go out without a coat.”

“Good,” whispered Lottie. She heard him go out into the bitter day, perhaps without a coat.

She felt well enough to go on with her letter to Kevin: “My neighbor does exercises in the doorway to show me how spry he is. At the end of each one he hops up and stands at attention, giving just one small disciplined bound in place. He is like someone who has done these things for years in a row with other men – in a jail, or a military hospital, or a prison camp, or the Army, or a mental home. In any one, or two, or three …”

Lottie and the old man shared a view. At night they heard the iron chimes of the cathedral. At dawn they could see the pink spire briefly red. Inside the cathedral, Death struck the hours in Dr. Keller’s clock, and at noon Our Lord blessed in turn each of the Apostles. Every noon – or, rather, at half past twelve, for the clock was half an hour off – the betrayal was announced by a mechanical cock flapping stiff wings. One night the neighbor typed all night, and, talking loudly to himself, went to bed before six, the hour at which the whole clumsy performance of the clock – chariots, pagan deities, signs of the zodiac, days of the week, Christ and the Apostles, the betrayal – finished its round. Lottie understood that night and day were done for before time from home could overtake them. She was dislocated, perhaps forever, like the clock.

The nurse returned next day with a doctor, who said, “It is a little fever.”

“What kind?” Lottie asked. Her teeth were chattering. “What about my nosebleeds?”

“A little simple cough. You take yourself too seriously.” He wrote out a prescription for three kinds of remedy, which were all patent medicines. Two of the three Vera had already bought. Lottie composed for Kevin: “I imagined – because with a fever you don’t know where imagination begins and a dream leaves off – that my mad neighbor had to repaint the outside of the
high school. I said, ‘Can’t the parishioners afford to hire someone?’ Isn’t it funny, my thinking it was a church?”

Her health improved; she got dressed and walked along the river, with Vera beside her. At the post office was a letter from Kevin, and for Vera a receipt from American Express in Rome for five hundred lire she had left as a deposit for forwarding her mail. This Vera misread as five hundred dollars she had received from home, and even when Lottie pointed out the error she continued to prattle on about what she was going to do with the money. She would take Lottie south! They would visit Al Wiczinski in Paris! Laughing, she picked up a glove someone had dropped on the pavement and put it in her pocket. Lottie was suddenly wildly angry about the glove, as if all the causes Vera had ever given for anger were pale compared with this particular offense. She walked back to the hotel, trembling with weakness and fury, and plotting some sort of obscure revenge.

The letter she had from Kevin began, “I’m fine. Sorry you aren’t feeling well.” She put it away with the Separatist tract found in the coffee shop. They were documents to be analyzed.

Vera said, “Listen, Lottie, I’m hard up for the moment. No, don’t look scared. I’ll just pawn something. If you’ve got anything you could lend me to pawn, that would be great.”

“Kevin,” Lottie thought she would write, “this morning I bundled all my trinkets into a scarf of Vera’s – Granny’s pearl and sapphire earrings I can’t wear because my ears aren’t pierced, and my cameo, which turned out to be worth nothing – and I went with Vera, who was whistling and singing and not worried at all. I had to leave my passport, because they said they were giving me a lot of money – fifteen thousand francs, which I handed to Vera, who took it as if it were a gift. She
paid her hotel bill. In the afternoon, she forgot where the money came from and what it was for, and she invited me with a grand air to the Kléber, a big café like a railway station. We drank three thousand and fifty francs’ worth of kümmel. Vera also invited the mad party from down the hall. He said he could read English and had been reading the love letters of Mark Twain. The band wore red coats and played ‘L’Amour Est un Bouquet de Violettes.’ Everywhere you go, you hear that played. The waiters were reading newspapers; there were high ceilings and trays of beer and enormous pretzels. Vera sang with the band. I wonder if I shall ever get my passport back.”

Whatever Lottie’s fever had been, it had worn itself down to bouts of coughing. Her head was stuffed with felt. When she looked at her old notes or tried to read anything, her eyes shut of their own accord. Without her passport she could not collect her mail. Why had Vera not given up her own? Because, said Vera, astonished at the question, then she would not have been able to get
her
mail, and, as she was expecting money from home, she needed it.

Lottie began to be worried about money. She had spent more than ever planned for on medicines, on the doctor and nurse, on the Christmas holiday in Colmar, which now seemed wild, wine-drenched.

On a cold, foggy winter Saturday, when she could hope for nothing in the post, and could not shake off her cough or rid herself of her pallor, the newspapers finally mentioned an epidemic of grippe that was sweeping through Europe. The symptoms resembled those of pneumonia. The popular name for it was Virus X. There had been two new deaths in Clermont-Ferrand. “Why do they always tell about what happens in Clermont-Ferrand?” said Vera.

She had received three hundred dollars from home. Without making a particular point of it, or showing any gratitude, she returned the fifteen thousand francs. “What I never did understand,” she said, as if discussing ancient history, “was why you didn’t just take your own money and unpawn your stuff and get your passport back.”

Lottie could not make sense of that. The passport had been tied up by Vera, and only Vera could undo the knot.

Vera had also received a birthday box from her sister-in-law, the wife of Honest Stan. It contained aspirin, Life Savers, two cards of snap fasteners, colored ribbon, needles, thread, a bottle of vitamin pills, Band-Aids, and Ivory soap. One aspirin was missing in each tin. “She sends me old clothes sometimes,” said Vera, groping at the bottom of the box. “She’s from a good old United Empire Loyalist family, true-blue Tory, one-hundred-per-cent Anglo-Saxon taste in clothes.” Lottie felt obscurely offended, as if her own taste had been impugned. Kevin was probably Irish, but, being Protestant, he counted as English. Remembering that Vera was a nut who collected lost gloves, Lottie ranged herself and Kevin on the side of Honest Stan’s wife. “There,” said Vera, with satisfaction, and pulled out a summer frock of blue voile sprigged with roses. It had puffed sleeves and reached midway between Vera’s hip and knee. Vera opened the window, shook out the dress, and sent it off. The dress, picked up by the wind, rose and then floated down. The Arab music had begun – it accompanied a certain dark hour of the day – and Vera said the dress was dancing to it.

On Sunday, when the sky was full of bells, and the snow along the canals a blue that was nearly white, Lottie walked with Vera, believing that this was spring. Upon the water was
the swift circle of a flight of birds. When the girls looked up from the reflection, the birds were white dots in the sky. Bridges, bare trees, and cobbles passed them, and Lottie, walking on a treadmill, was all at once drenched in sweat, and trembling, and had to lean on Vera’s arm. Put to bed, she lay limp, mute, her mouth dry, her hands burning. There was a new electric pain in her lungs. In her mind she wrote to Kevin, “My thesis is a mess. I haven’t done any work, and here it is past the middle of January. Most of the things Keller let me think weren’t true.…”

The firemen’s band marching beneath the window played a fat, German-sounding military air. She was like a wooden toy apart at the joints, scattered to the four corners of the room. Each of the pieces was marred. Yet by evening she was suddenly better. She got up again and walked with Vera in the cold, snowy night, dragging Bonzo on the end of a rope. She thought, but did not say, that it was the most beautiful night she had ever seen. She admired, in silence, the lamps in the brown canals and in the icy branches above. Suddenly Vera snatched Bonzo’s rope and, cape flying, ran like a streak. Vera could be perfectly happy with or without Al, probably with or without Lottie. The important thing was feeling free, and never being alone.

Only one letter was waiting at the post office when Lottie turned up, passport in hand. Kevin wrote, “A funny-looking girl called Rose Perry has been around this winter. Some friend of yours introduces us saying we have a lot in common because she is a sociologist, like you, and also High Anglican, though I don’t know why that gives us something in common. She’s around thirty, red hair, funny-looking – I already said that. She’s from England, either taking some other degree or
just picking up material on the white-collar class in the prairie provinces for her own fun. Now, why couldn’t you have done just that and never left home? Rose says the integration idea isn’t new. She’s been having a hungry winter. Her scholarship isn’t a hell of a lot, and it’s in pounds, not dollars. We’ve had her over to the house.”