Mavis Gallant - Home Truths

“What I would like, Kevin — I don’t know if you’ll think it’s a good idea — would be to go back with you. If I stay here, I’ll get pneumonia. It’s a good thing you came. Vera was killing me.”

“Her letters didn’t sound like it. Who is she, anyway?”

“A girl from home. A Ukrainian. She got in trouble, and they sent her away. Forget Vera.”

“They could have just sent her to Minneapolis,” said Kevin.

“Too close,” said Lottie. “She might have slipped back.”

“I guess you’ll be glad to get out of here,” said Kevin, as the bells struck the hour. He left her and returned to the hotel near the station, where he had taken a room. He could not rid himself of the fear that there might be detectives.

As she had promised, Lottie accompanied Vera to Germany. Kevin was with them. Once her passport was stamped, Vera thought she would go to Paris and help Al out of whatever predicament he was in, perhaps for the last time. “I liked it in Rome, where it was sort of crazy, but Paris is cold and dirty, and now he’s twenty-six,” said Vera.

“You mean, he should settle down,” said Kevin, not making of it a question, and without asking what Vera imagined her help to Al could consist of.

Vera was hypocritically meek with Kevin, though she smiled when he said “Ukarainian,” in five syllables. Lottie saw that if Vera had for one moment wavered, if she had considered going home because Lottie was leaving, the voice from home saying “Ukarainian” had reminded her of what the return would be. That was Vera’s labyrinth. Lottie was on her way out. Kevin held Lottie’s hand when Vera wasn’t looking. He was friendly toward Vera, but protective of Lottie, which was the right imbalance. Lottie guessed he had made up his mind.

They walked on a coating of slush and ice — they had left the sun and the rivers on the other side.

In a totally gray village nothing stirred. Beyond it, on the dirty, icy highway by some railway tracks, they came upon a knot of orphans and a clergyman. The two groups passed each other without a glance. In a moment the children were out of sight. Answering a remark of Kevin’s, Vera said they were ten or eleven years old, and unlikely to remember the air raids eight years ago. The sky was low and looked unwashed. On the horizon the dark blue mountains were so near now that Lottie saw where they rose from the plain. “Appenweier” — that was the name of the place. It was like those mysterious childhood railway journeys that begin and end in darkness.

“Are you girls by any chance going anyplace in particular?” said Kevin.

They turned and looked at him. No, they were just walking. Vera was not even leading the way.

“Well, I’m sorry then,” said Kevin, “but as the saying goes, I’ve had it,” and he marched them to the bombed station, and onto a train, and so back to France.

If that was Germany, there was nothing to wait for, expect, or return to. She had not crossed a frontier but come up to another limit.

Vera packed some things and left some, and departed for Paris. She and Lottie did not kiss, and Vera left the hotel without looking back. Her room — because it was cheaper — was instantly taken over by the mad neighbor. Kevin spent the evening, supperless, and part of the night with Lottie. Vera also must have been an inhibiting factor for him, Lottie decided — not just the phantom detectives. He might have taken Lottie to his hotel, which was more comfortable, but he thought it would look funny. They had given Vera a day’s start. Kevin and Lottie were leaving for Zurich in the morning, and from Zurich flying home. Lottie did not think this night would give her a claim on Kevin, but when she woke, at an hour she could not place — woke because the Arabs were quarrelling outside the window, got up to shut the window and, in the dark, comb her hair — she thought that a memory of it could. Vera had left a parcel of food. If she had not been afraid of disturbing Kevin, she would have spread it on the table and eaten a meal — salami, pickles, butter, and bread, half a bottle of Sylvaner.

Kevin now rose, obsessed by what the people who owned the hotel might be supposing. He smoked a cigarette, refused the wine, and put on his clothes. He and Lottie were to meet next morning at the station; there was some confusion about the time. Kevin remarked, with a certain pride, that as far as he was concerned it was now around seven at night. He had brought a travelling clock to lend to Lottie so that she could wake up in plenty of time to pack. He set it for six, and placed the clock where she could reach it.

Lottie made a list not of what she was taking but of what she was leaving behind: food, wilted anemones, medicine, all Vera’s residue as well as her own. The hotel maid would have a full day of it, and could not get away with saying “À quoi bon?” Lottie could not make herself believe that someone else would be sleeping in this room and that there would be no trace of Lottie and Vera anywhere. She rose before the alarm rang, and stood at the window with the curtain in her hand. She composed, “Last night, just at the end of the night, the sky and the air were white as milk. Snow had fallen and a thick low fog lay in the streets and on the water, filling every crack between the houses. The cathedral bells were iron and muffled in snow. I heard drunks up and down the sidewalk most of the night.”

This could not be a letter to Kevin; he was there, across the city, and had never received any of the others. It was not a letter to anyone. There was no sense to what she was doing. She would never do it again. That was the first of many changes.

My father died, then my grandmother; my mother was left, but we did not get on. I was probably disagreeable with anyone who felt entitled to give me instructions and advice. We seldom lived under the same roof, which was just as well. She had found me civil and amusing until I was ten, at which time I was said to have become pert and obstinate. She was impulsive, generous, in some ways better than most other people, but without any feeling for cause and effect; this made her at the least unpredictable and at the most a serious element of danger. I was fascinated by her, though she worried me; then all at once I lost interest. I was fifteen when this happened. I would forget to answer her letters and even to open them. It was not rejection or anything so violent as dislike but a simple indifference I cannot account for. It was much the way I would be later with men I fell out of love with, but I was too young to know that then. As for my mother, whatever I thought, felt, said, wrote, and wore had always been a positive source of exasperation. From time to time she attempted to alter the form, the outward shape at least, of the creature she thought she was modelling, but at last she came to the conclusion there must be something wrong with the clay. Her final unexpected upsurge of attention coincided with my abrupt unconcern: one may well have been the reason for the other.

It took the form of digging into my diaries and notebooks and it yielded, among other documents, a two-year-old poem, Kiplingesque in its rhythms, entitled “Why I Am a Socialist.” The first words of the first line were “You ask …,” then came a long answer. But it was not an answer to anything she’d wondered. Like all mothers — at least, all I have known — she was obsessed with the entirely private and possibly trivial matter of a daughter’s virginity. Why I was a Socialist she rightly conceded to be none of her business. Still, she must have felt she had to say something, and the something was “You had better be clever, because you will never be pretty.” My response was to take — take, not grab — the poem from her and tear it up. No voices were raised. I never mentioned the incident to anyone. That is how it was. We became, presently, mutually unconcerned. My detachment was put down to the coldness of my nature, hers to the exhaustion of trying to bring me up. It must have been a relief to her when, in the first half of Hitler’s war, I slipped quietly and finally out of her life. I was now eighteen, and completely on my own. By “on my own” I don’t mean a show of independence with Papa-Mama footing the bills: I mean that I was solely responsible for my economic survival and that no living person felt any duty toward me.