Mavis Gallant - Home Truths

They missed the bus they ought to have taken back to Colmar and had a three-hour wait. Vera pretended it had been planned that way. Tugging at Lottie, she made for a café. Here a Christmas tree gave off fragrance in waves, like a hyacinth. Radio Stuttgart offered them carols. Vera ate a mountain of sauerkraut and ham and sausage and drank a bottle of white wine. “Poor old Al, he’s got no one but me, and here it is Christmas Eve!” she said gaily.

Elbows on table, head in her hands, Lottie read a newspaper. “Pinay has resigned,” she said.

“No skin off my nose,” said Vera.

“It’ll skin theirs. He was keeping the franc up.” Hearing the carols on the radio, Lottie wished she were religious. It might take her mind off such things as high finance, her own health, and scholarship.

“You know about exchange and all that,” said Vera. “I just know when I can’t afford to do what I want.”

“May I ask, Vera, what you live on?”

“My family, for the moment. But Frannie and my brother Joe will both be in college in about a year and then I’ll have to be on my own. The family can’t keep all three of us.”

“It’s good of them to keep you now,” said Lottie. “You don’t work or anything.”

“They get me instead of a holiday in California. I’m their luxury.”

“Don’t they think you should work?”

“They haven’t said,” said Vera, grinning. “I’m waiting for the right suggestion. You know where I was this time last year? In Rome. I’d just met Al.”

“You’ve been away a long time,” Lottie said. “I could never stay away that long.”

“Who wants you to?”

The trouble with Vera was that she was indifferent. She had made Lottie come all the way to Colmar, with a complicated change of trains, and had tramped her up and down the rainy slopes on Christmas Eve, just so that she, Vera, would not feel lonely. Vera whistled with the radio, stopped, and said, “I had a little girl.”

“I don’t understand you. Oh, I’m sorry. I do.”

“She’s been adopted.”

Lottie said stiffly, “I’m sure she’s in a good home.”

“I dream she’s following me. In the dream I’m not like me. I look like Michèle Morgan. I dream I’m leading her through woods and holding branches so they won’t snap back in her face. She could be dead. When it’s raining like it was this afternoon, she could be outside, with nobody looking after her.”

The only protection Lottie had received until now in her native country was an implicit promise that no one would ever talk this way.

“The family were over here a couple of times. Nothing’s changed. They still say, ‘Why don’t you do something about your hair?’ They don’t seem to think I’ll ever come back, or want to. The doctor who looked after the adoption kept writing to them, ‘Il faut lui trouver un bon mari. ’ Instead of doing that, they put me in a sort of convent school, and I nearly died. You don’t know how it was over here four, five years ago. Now they let me do what I like. I’ll find a mari if I feel like it. If I don’t, too bad for them.” Vera at this moment looked despairingly plain.

“It’s a sad sort of life for you, Vera. You’ve been on your own since you were what — seventeen?”

“You feeling sorry for me?”

Feeling sorry had not occurred to Lottie; she was astonished that Vera would think it possible. Feeling sorry would have meant she was not minding her own business. Vera had certainly been away a long time. Otherwise she would never have supposed such a thing.

The next morning at breakfast, in a coffee shop Vera liked because the croissants were stuffed with almond paste, Lottie gave Vera her Christmas present — a leather case that would hold a pack of Gauloises. Vera had nothing for Lottie. She turned the case over in her hand, as if wondering what the occasion was. Lottie, slightly embarrassed, picked up from the leather seat beside her a folded, harsh-looking tract. She spread it on the glass-topped table. It was cheaply printed. In German, it informed its finder that “in the mountains” a Separatist movement that seemed to have died had only been sleeping. Recent injustices had warmed it to life.

“I know all about this,” said Vera importantly, snatching it away. Her political eye looked for the printer, and she was triumphant pointing out that the name was absent, which proved that the tract was from a clandestine press.

“Of course,” said Lottie, puzzled. “Who else would print it? That’s what it’s about, a clandestine movement. What I don’t understand is, what do they want to separate from?”

“France, you dope,” said Vera.

“I know all that,” said Lottie, in her slowest voice. “I’m only trying to say that if there are people here who don’t want to belong to France, then my proposition doesn’t hold water. The idea is, these people are supposed to be loyal but still keep their national characteristics.”

“There aren’t many. Just a couple of nuts.”

“There mustn’t even be one.”

“It’s your own fault for inventing something and then trying to stick people in it.” Vera talked, or, rather, rambled on, until the arrival of hot chocolate and croissants , when she began to stuff her mouth. Lottie folded the tract with care. A few minutes later she was once more rattling around inside a bus, headed now for Kaysersberg. “Good place for Christmas,” Vera decreed, consulting but not sharing a green guidebook she kept in the pocket of her cape.

“You said Colmar was a good place for Christmas!” Lottie said. Vera took no notice of this.

Kaysersberg might have been chewed by rats. The passage of armies seven years ago still littered the streets. They walked away from here and over fields toward another town Vera said would be better. The sun was warm on Lottie’s back, and her mother’s Persian-lamb coat was a suit of armor. Beside the narrow road, vines tied to sticks seemed to be sliding uphill. It was a trick of the eye. Another illusion was the way the mountains moved: they rose and collapsed, soft-looking, green, purple, charcoal, deserting Lottie when she turned her head. All at once a vineyard fell away, and there for one minute, spread before her, was the plain of the Rhine, strung with glistening villages, and a church steeple here and there poking through the mist. Across the river were dark clouds or dark hills. She could not see where they joined the horizon or where they rose from the plain, So this was the place she loathed and craved, and never mentioned. It was the place where her mother and father had been born, and which they seemed unable to imagine, forgive, or describe.

“Well, that’s Germany,” said Vera. “I’ll have to go over one of these days and get my passport stamped. They didn’t stamp it when I came in from Italy, and it has to be done every three months.”

Lottie wished she were looking at a picture and not a real place. She wished she were a child and could pretend it was a picture. “I’ll never go there!” she said.

They walked on and entered Riquewihr in a soft wash of mud that came over the tops of Vera’s shoes. “Three stars in the book,” said Vera, not even trying to be jaunty anymore. “God, what a tomb! You expect people here to come crawling out of their huts covered with moss and weeds.”

“But you’ve been here, Vera? You said you had been all over.”

“I haven’t been exactly here. I thought it would be nice for you for Christmas.”

Lottie considered briefly the preposterous thought that Vera had not been trying to wear her out but to entertain her. Suddenly, as if it were Lottie’s fault, Vera began to complain about the way streets had been in Winnipeg when Vera’s mother was a girl. Where Vera’s mother had lived, there hadn’t been any sidewalks; there were wooden planks. If Vera’s mother stepped off a plank, she was likely to lose her overshoe in the gumbo mud. In the good part of town, on Wellington Crescent, there were no pavements either, but for a different reason. When Ukrainian children were taken across the city on digestive airings, after Sunday lunch, to look at Wellington Crescent houses — when their parents had at last lost the Old Country habit of congregating in public parks and learned the New World custom of admiring the houses of people more fortunate than they were — the children, wondering at the absence of sidewalks, were told that people here had always had carriages and then motorcars and had never needed to walk.