Mavis Gallant - Home Truths

“Let’s go over to Germany,” Vera said for the second time. “It’s nothing — just another bus ride. Maybe a train this time. All I have to do is get my passport stamped and come right back. It’s just like crossing a road.”

“Not for me it isn’t.”

Falling asleep that night, Lottie heard, pounding outside her window, a steam-driven machine the Arab workers had somehow got their hands on but could not operate. They sounded as if they were cursing each other. The sounds of Strasbourg were hard and ugly sometimes: trains and traffic, and in the night drunken people shouting the thick dialect.

“Lottie, wake up,” Vera said.

Lottie thought she was in a café and that the waitress had said, “If you fall asleep here, I shall call the police.” The room was full of white snow light, and Lottie was still clothed, under the eiderdown. Someone had taken off her shoes. She saw a bunch of anemones, red and blue, in a glass on the edge of the hopelessly plugged washbasin. “The nut next door brought us each a bunch of them,” said Vera. She was bright and dressed, wearing tangerine lipstick that made her mouth twice as big as it should have been. “You know what time it is? One o’clock. Boy, do you look terrible! Al’s just called from Paris. I wonder who paid for that? I thought he was calling because it’s my twenty-first birthday, but he’s just lonely. He wants me to come. I said, ‘Why are we always doing something for your good? You’ve already left me stranded in Alsace.’ I don’t think he ever intended to come. He said, ‘You know I need you, but I leave it up to you.’ It’s this moral-pressure business. Would it work with you?”

“Yes,” said Lottie. She lay with her eyes open, imagining Strasbourg empty. How would she go alone to the post office?

“I hate letting him down. He’s been through a lot.”

“Then go.”

“I don’t think I should leave you. You look worse than when you had Virus X.”

“We’ll go out and drink to your birthday,” Lottie said. “I’ll look better then.”

Walking again, crossing rivers and canals, they saw a man in a canoe. The water was green and thick and still. Along the banks the trees seemed bedded out, like the pansies in the graveyard. How rough and shaggy woods at home seemed now! Nothing there was ever dry underfoot until high summer, and then in a short time the ground was boggy again.

“I always felt I had less right to be Canadian than you, even though we’ve been there longer,” Vera said. “I’ve never understood that coldness. I know you aren’t English, but it’s all the same. You can be a piece of ice when you want to. When you walked into the restaurant that day in Paris, I felt cold to the bone.”

The canoe moved without a sound.

In a brasserie opposite the cathedral, where they celebrated Vera’s coming of age, smoke lay midway between floor and ceiling, a motionless layer of blue. “I only want one thing for my birthday and there it is,” said Vera, pointing to a player piano. Rolls were fed to the piano (“Poet and Peasant,” the overture to “William Tell,” “Vienna Blood”) and not only did the piano keys rise and fall but the circle of violins, upside down, as if reflected, revolved and ground out spirited melodies. Two little lamps with spangled shades decorated the instrument, which the waitress said was German and very old. That reminded Lottie, and she said, “I’ll go with you tomorrow, if you want to, to get your passport stamped.”

“It’s not Moscow, for God’s sake,” said Vera. “It’s only over there.”

They stayed after everyone else had gone, and the smoke and the smell of pork and cabbage grew cold. They drank kümmel and made perfect sense.

“But Vera” — Lottie tried to be serious — “what are you going to do now that you are twenty-one?”

“I don’t know. Find out why one aspirin was missing from each tin.”

When they reached the hotel, drunk on friendship and with nothing to worry about but what to do with the rest of the day, Kevin was there. He sat with his habitual patience, in the hotel lobby, wearing his overcoat, reading a stained, plastic-covered, and over-confident bar list — the hotel served only coffee and chips and beer. He was examining the German and French columns of the menu with equal forbearance; he understood neither, and probably had no desires.

One day, she would become accustomed to Kevin, Lottie said to herself; stop seeing him, as she had nearly grown used to mountains. She thought, crazily, that if it had been Dr. Keller or any other man here to take her away, she would have clung to his hands and wept all over them. He looked so reassuring. She thought, A conservative Canadian type, and the words made her want to marry him. The confidence he assumed for them both let her know that if she had not worked on her thesis it was Dr. Keller’s fault; he had prepared her badly. If she had been taken ill, it was because of a virus no one had ever heard of at home. When she saw the shapeless overcoat and the rubbers over his shoes that would make people laugh in Paris, she did not care, and she was happy because he could not read anything but English. That was the way he had to be.

“We can’t talk here,” she said. “Come upstairs.”

“Is it all right?”

“Oh, they don’t care.”

He followed her up the stairs. He was ill at ease. He was worried about the hotel detectives.

“It’s a lovely room, Kevin. Wait till you see the view, like a Flemish painting. And so warm. They leave the heat on all night. In Paris …”

From the doorway, looking around, he took in the half-drained basin with its greasy rim, the carton she used as a wastebasket, her underthings drying on a wire hanger, the table covered with a wine-stained cloth, the unmade bed. Lottie thought he was admiring her anemones. “My crazy neighbor gave them to me,” she said. “The old boy from the military hospital. The one who’s been writing the poem for Vera and me.”

“No,” said Kevin. “You never mentioned him. You mentioned this Vera just once. Then you stopped writing.”

“I wrote all the time.”

“I never got the letters. One of mine was returned. I guess the mail system here isn’t exactly up to date.”

“It must have been returned when I was too sick to go to the post office. You have to show your passport.”

“I know, but I got just this one letter. If Vera hadn’t been writing and telling your mother not to worry, I’d have been over before. It was a long time of nothing — not even a card for Christmas. Vera said how hard you were working, how busy.” He left the door ajar but consented to sit on the unmade bed. “So, when I got the chance of a free hop to Zurich, a press flight …” He looked as if he would never grow old. The lines in his face might deepen, that was all. “I knew you’d had this flu. That can take a lot out of you.”

“Yes. It was good of you to come and see how I was. How long can you stay?”

“One, two days. I don’t want to interfere with your work.”

Vera had said, “You’ve kept him on the string since you were sixteen. You’ll bring it off.” Ah, but it was one thing to be sixteen, pretty but modest, brilliant but unassuming. Her frail health had been slightly in her favor then. She had made the mistake of going away, and she had let Kevin discover he could get on without her. She held his hands and pretended to be as conscious as he was of the half-open door. They had never been as alone as at this moment and might never be again. They were almost dangerously on the side of friendship. If she began explaining everything that had taken place, from the moment she saw the holly in Paris and filled out her first police questionnaire, then they might become very good friends indeed, but would probably never marry.