Mavis Gallant - Home Truths

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.”

He likes her, and I know why, Lottie thought. Because she is English. His family will look after her, feed her, find her a place to stay. If I were having a hungry winter, I would be the immigrants’ child who hadn’t made it. I wouldn’t dare have a hungry winter.

The sun shone — a pale sunlight, the first of 1953. Vera climbed up the spire of the cathedral while Lottie waited below — two hundred-odd steps of winding stone to a snowy platform where pigeons hopped on the ledge, and where eighteenth-century tourists had carved the record of their climb. Up there, Vera heard the piercing screams of a schoolyard full of children. She went up a smaller and older-seeming spiral to the very top, above the cathedral bells, which she could see through windows carved in stone. Ice formed on the soles of her shoes. She was mystically moved, she declared, by the appearance of the bells, which seemed to hang over infinite space.

Walking in Vera’s shadow, Lottie thought, I should never have seen her after that trip to Fontainebleau.

The days were lighter and longer. The rivers and canals became bottle green, and the delicate trees beside them were detached from fog. Vera and Lottie went often to the Grande Taverne de Kléber. When Lottie had enough kümmel to drink, Vera made sense. On one brilliantly sunny day, two girls came into the Kléber laughing the indomitable laughter of girls proving they can be friends, and Lottie said, “Look, Vera, that is like you and me.” Presently they got up and changed cafés, moving by this means four streets nearer the hotel. The table here was covered with someone’s cigarette ash — someone who had been here for a long time. There was in the air, with the smell of beer and fresh coffee, a substance made up of old conversations. The windows were black and streaked with melted snow. Each rivulet reflected the neon inside.