Mavis Gallant - Home Truths

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.