Mavis Gallant - Home Truths

Vera was passionate over a past she knew nothing about. It was just her mother’s folklore. Vera’s mother, Lottie now learned, had washed in snow water. Vera herself could remember snow carried into the house and melted on the kitchen stove.

“Well, then, your father moved the whole family, I suppose,” said Lottie, remembering Winnipeg Culture Patterns with Dr. Keller.

“That’s right,” said Vera, without inflection. “To your part of town.”

Lottie had still not sent the Christmas cable to Kevin. Could she send it from here? It was early morning in Winnipeg — scarcely dawn.

Lottie intended to set off for Strasbourg the instant Christmas was over, but Vera gained another day. In the morning they went to see a movie called Das Herz Einer Frau , subtitled Ich Suche Eine Mutti — an incredibly sad story about a laundress and her little boy. Lottie, exasperated, turned to say something but saw that Vera was wiping tears. Later, she and Vera boldly entered a police station, where Vera asked questions on Al’s behalf. Lottie sat staring at a sign: “C’est CHIC de parler Français!” “Chic” was in red.

It was plain that Vera’s plans had gone wrong; Al’s arrival should have coincided with Lottie’s going. Vera did not want to go off to Strasbourg in case he came here, and she did not want Lottie to desert her. She coaxed from Lottie one more excursion, this time not far away. After a mercifully short bus trip, they walked under pines. In these woods, so tame, so gardened, that Lottie did not know what to call them, they stumbled on a ruin covered with moss and ivy. “It is part of the Maginot Line, I think,” said Vera.

Lottie, frantic with being where she did not want to be, turned from her and cried, “Is that what it is? The Maginot Line? No wonder they lost the war.”

“Is that what Dr. Keller taught you? Why do you think one piece is all of everything?”

“What else can you do?” said Lottie. The mist carried in her lungs since Paris darkened and filled her chest. “You don’t understand, Vera. I’m not strong physically. That’s what I meant that day on the train, when you said ‘weak, not frail.’ I am frail, and I have to do this thesis on my own. I have to choose my own books and work with people I’ve never met before. I’ve never used a strange library. You’ve made me walk a lot. I’ve got this very low blood pressure. One day my heart might just stop.”

“Yes, well, it was a mistake,” said Vera. She folded her arms under her cape and kicked at the Maginot Line instead of kicking herself, or Al, or Lottie.

III

The advantage of Strasbourg over any other place was that Lottie here had a warm room. In a hotel on the Quai des Bateliers, discovered by Vera, she unpacked the notes and files. She could see the spire of the cathedral, encased in scaffolding, rosy and buoyed up on plain air. Chimes and bells evenly punctuated her days and nights. Every night, at a dark foggy hour, she heard strange tunes — tunes that seemed to be trying to escape from between two close parallel lines. The sound came from a shack full of Arabs, across from the hotel, on the bank of a canal. In the next room but one, Lottie had a neighbor, a man who typed. The empty room between them was a sounding box. She heard him talking to himself sometimes and walking about. His step was quick. Vera was also on this floor, at the end of a corridor papered with lettuce-sized roses. Her room gave onto nothing of interest, and her window sill was already a repository for bread, butter, dime-store knives, and old newspapers.

On January 9th, a month to the day after her arrival in France, Lottie wrote her first long letter to Kevin. The postcards she had sent from Paris and Colmar said, “I am working hard,” which was not so, and “It is terribly cold,” and “I’m saving it up to tell you when I get back.” Her real letters to him were those she composed in her head and was too shy to write. She could imagine him listening to anything she had to tell him but not reading what she wrote. “I went to the opening of the European Assembly in a new prefab building that already looks like a shack, looks left over from the war,” she wrote, hoping that this would be a letter of such historical importance he would keep it in a folder. “A sign said that anyone showing approval or disapproval would be thrown out. There were hardly any visitors, and I did not have the feeling that history was being made. It was all dry and dull. I listened to the translators through the headphones, but it was more of a strain than just hearing an unknown language. Sort of English-English and bored French. M. Spaak was not there, because he had rheumatism (at least that’s what I understood) and just when this was announced I felt the start of a chill and had to rush out and home in a cab. I was shaking so much in my fur coat that Vera was frightened. It’s not serious” — she felt her beginning going off the rails — “but I’ve got a chill and a fever and a bad cough and a pain in my chest and a sore throat. Vera has bought me some pills full of codeine. Vera believes in sweat. A dog that belongs to this hotel, name of Bonzo, came in to see me. I gave him a piece of stale bread and he took it under the bed, with his legs and tail sticking out flat. It suddenly occurred to me today that there is no such thing as sociology. When you are a sociologist, all you can do is teach more of the same, and every professor has his own idea about what it is. Vera says that if I were studying the integration of Indians, which never happened anyway, it would not be called sociology. Vera will take this out to mail.”

Lottie could eat nothing until the next day, when, mostly to pacify Vera, she picked at a helping of macaroni and gravy. Vera sat at Lottie’s clean table and proceeded to make a mess of it. She drank beer out of a bottle and, when she had drunk all she wanted, poured the rest in the washbasin. “Do you mind the smell?” she asked, too late, peering down. Vera was already on a first-name basis with the whole hotel, and particularly friendly with the man who typed. He was an elderly madman, who had only a week before been released from the mental ward of a military hospital.

“What do you type?” Vera had asked him.

“Poems,” he replied, looking at her with one eye. (The other was glass.)

Vera read aloud from France-Soir to Lottie, who disliked being read to. “Le trentième anniversaire de la mort de Katherine Mansfield est célébré aujourd’hui à Avon.”

“They’ll see I got rid of that china rose,” said Vera, very pleased.

In the night, Lottie spat blood. It looked bright and pure, like a chip of jewel. She had coughed enough to rupture a small blood vessel. Out of childhood came recollections of monumental nosebleeds, and of the whole family worried. As if to confirm the memory, Vera came bustling in, for all the world like Lottie’s mother. She found Lottie lying across the bed with her head hanging back. She closed the window, then covered Lottie with the eiderdown. Lottie was irritated. “I need lots and lots of air,” she said. Being irritated brought on an attack of coughing and pain. Vera began opening and closing windows again.

Lottie wanted to write to Kevin. “My coldness to Vera frightens me. She came in again now and was sweet and kind, and I thought I would scream. She smelled of the bar downstairs in the hotel where she likes to hang out eating stale chips and talking to men. She sat on the bed and stroked my pillow saying, ‘Isn’t there anything I can do for you?’ She seems lost and lonely because Al hasn’t turned up. She offers all the kindness she can in exchange for something I don’t want to give because I can’t spare it. A grain of love? Maybe the Pole, Al, is hell. It is not my fault. I shrank into myself, cold, cold. We are all like that. So are you, Kevin. Finally I said, ‘Vera, would you mind awfully opening the window?’ and she aired the room (she likes doing that) and held her cape so as to protect me from the draft. She looked around for something else to do. ‘I’ll go and complain about that washbasin,’ she said. ‘Yes, do go,’ I said. I wanted to be left alone. She felt it, and went away looking as if she would never understand why.”