Home Truths (28 page)

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.

T
he 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.

“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.

“L
ottie, 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.

“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.

A
s 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.”