Howard Norman - I Hate to Leave This Beautiful Place

Within an hour, in bed in Mathilde’s apartment, our uninhibited lovemaking was new and surprising. Something had let go. “I don’t care what anybody says. This feels like a marriage bed,” she said, then got up to smoke a cigarette and make coffee.

“Well, you’d know and I wouldn’t.”

I immediately regretted saying that, but she seemed to ignore it. Yet the very sweat on our bodies and bedclothes seemed to be the prescient fragrance of final melancholy. Our lips were sore and swollen, and we took separate hot baths.

The next morning, Mathilde left before I woke, two days earlier than she’d originally planned. From Regina, Saskatchewan, she sent a picture postcard of a man and woman eloping: the man had set a ladder against a house and was standing on the top rung, just outside the woman’s open bedroom window, through which she was handing him her suitcase. Through the living room window you could see the woman’s mother and father watching television. President Eisenhower was on the screen. There was a full moon in the sky. The scolding caption read: The moon makes these two act impetuously! Big mistake! Matilda’s own handwritten message was: I do.

I don’t know much about premonition. Nor would I necessarily recognize, let alone trust, its opportunities. Yet thinking back on those particular days, it may have been some sort of premonitory agitation that kept me awake for the eight nights of Hanukkah, which framed on the calendar Mathilde’s absence. I slept in fits and starts during the day, but I didn’t sleep one minute at night. It was an insomnia tailored to this circumstance and was unnerving.

Isador Sarovnik wasn’t technically my uncle. I informally adopted him and referred to him as an uncle because, beyond his being avuncular, I felt far closer to him than I did to any of my actual relatives. Bereft of parents, bereft of locatable uncles and aunts, I began to concentrate every ounce of filial love and affection onto others, Isador being the most indispensable and dear to me.

In Isador I saw the complete résumé of an interesting, beloved uncle. In December of 1969, Isador was eighty-one years old. He had retired at age sixty-five from being a bellman (“I was the first Jewish senior bellman in Nova Scotia, possibly in all of Canada”) at several hotels in Halifax, ending with the Lord Nelson. Before Hitler’s psychotic Reich, Isador had been a stage actor in Berlin and Budapest; as he mentioned at every opportunity, as a young man he was friends with Peter Lorre. “Lazzy got me a little acting work after the war,” Isador told me. Given that all but a few of his relatives, and many of his friends, had been slaughtered in concentration camps, the fact that Isador had played, in The Cross of Lorraine, the part of a Nazi soldier was something he could never forgive himself for, “even though I was raising a family and needed work.” His wife, Sarah, had died in 1962, and his two daughters lived in Vancouver; he saw them infrequently, which was a source of great sadness to him.

Isador harbored special affection for Peter Lorre, and once, quite seriously, said to me, “In the 1950s I wrote a letter to Los Angeles and invited Lazzy to Halifax, but he had no interest in this part of the world. I would have made it nice for him. Rolled out the red carpet in the hotel here. Too bad.” One night in his hotel room I watched Casablanca with Isador. When Lorre first appeared on screen, Isador said, “Lazzy looks very good in that suit.”

When Hanukkah arrived, Isador asked me to eat dinner with him on all eight nights in his room, number 411. By then I knew the hotel. I’d had short-lived employment as a bellman at a time when Isador, a respected emeritus figure, was filling in as concierge for a man who had the flu. I remember Isador saying, “I call it influenza — not flu. You don’t use nicknames. You don’t buddy up to something that can kill you.” As a bellman I’d lasted about ten days, finally getting sacked because I called a woman whose luggage I was carrying a “wrinkled fucking old whore” in response to her confiding to me in the electric lift, “I wouldn’t have registered in this hotel had I known an old Jew was the concierge.” As it happened, the manager of the hotel had been in the electric lift, too.

I delivered the suitcases to the woman’s room. Every bellman had been instructed to tell each patron his name and say, “If there is anything you need, please ask for me at the front desk.” But after setting her suitcases down, I said, “If you want to jump out the window, call the front desk and ask for me. I’ll come right up and open it for you.” I didn’t wait for a tip. The hotel manager had politely kept the gate of the electric lift open and was waiting for me. I was unemployed by the time we reached the lobby.

Despite being fired, I often hung around the hotel lobby. I liked sitting on one of the big sofas to read. I had lunch with Isador at least three times a week. But the pertinent thing here is that Isador adored Mathilde. I knew so few people in Halifax, and he was the one person who spent any time with us as a couple, mainly over dinners at the hotel. On the other hand, I met any number of Mathilde’s artist friends, usually over coffee in cafés or at art galleries. Whenever anyone asked me what I did in life, I’d say, “I’m working on it”—feeble, unimpressive, but true. Once, a little tipsy at a painting exhibit, I said, “Well, I’m going to write a novel, but I’m not starting it for fifteen years.” (This must have sounded acerbic if not delusional, but as it turned out, it was prophetic: my first novel was published when I was thirty-eight, and it took three years to write.) I knew the question, from Mathilde’s friends, was really, “Why are you with him?” It was a good question, a question from curious and protective friends. It was a question I’d often asked myself.

So, during Hanukkah, Isador would say the blessings, light the candles, and set out dinner, sent up from the hotel kitchen. I had some deep discussions with him about life and love. By life I mean Mathilde. With Isador it was never a case of his dishing out platitudes, no Tuesdays with Morrie bullshit, all sweetness and light. “You know who I saw the other day?” he asked. “That son of a bitch Mr. Kelb. You remember, I told you he used to live in the hotel here, what, maybe twenty years. Then his son and daughter-in-law gave him his own room above their garage. Do you know that when that son of a bitch lived in the hotel, he used to walk in, hand me his bag of groceries — me, the senior bellman — get on the electric lift, and slide the gate shut behind him so I’d have to wait for him to send it down again. He’d say the same goddamn thing every time: ‘I prefer to go upstairs unencumbered.’ Let them put that on his gravestone for all I care. Except I hope when he kicks the bucket he’s going downstairs, not upstairs, if you know what I mean.”

Apart from the elopement postcard, I wasn’t hearing from Mathilde at all. On the fifth night of Hanukkah, I mentioned this to Isador. He’d just set the room service tray out in the hallway. “What’s there for her to tell you?” Isador said. “She’s freezing her tuches off out there in Saskatchewan. She’s painting her paintings. She’s sleeping, she’s waking up. But that’s not the problem, is it? No, the problem is, you’re in over your head with this Mathilde. You’re drowning. She’s walking so far ahead of you — is this how it feels? — she’s about to turn the corner and disappear. You need to figure out what skills you have. I can get you work in the hotel if you want. I’m sure the thing that happened with the anti-Semite is water under the bridge by now. Besides, the hotel’s got a new owner. It’s been advertising for bellmen.”