Mavis Gallant - Home Truths

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?”

“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.”