Montreal Stories (37 page)

I was in the South of France, walking along a quay battered by autumn waves, as low in mind as I was ever likely to be. My marriage had dropped from a height. There weren’t two pieces left I could fit together. Lapwing wasn’t to blame, yet I kept wanting to hold him responsible for something. Why? I still don’t know. I said to myself, O.K., imagine your name is Harry Lapwing. Harry Lapwing. You are a prairie Socialist, a William Morris scholar. All your life this will make you appear boring and dull. When you went to England in the late forties and said you were Canadian, and Socialist, and working on aspects of William Morris, people got a stiff, trapped look, as if you were about to read them a poem. You had the same conversation twenty-seven times, once for each year of your life:

“Which part of Canada are you from?”

“I was born in Manitoba.”

“We have cousins in Victoria.”

“I’ve never been out there.”

“I believe it’s quite pretty.”

“I wouldn’t know. Anyway, I haven’t much eye.”

One day, in France, at a shabby Mediterranean resort called Rivebelle (you had gone there because it was cheap) someone said, “I’d say you’ve got quite an eye—very much so,” looking straight at Edie, your wife.

The speaker was a tall, slouched man with straight black hair, pale skin, and a limp. (It turned out that some kid at the beach had gouged him behind the knee with the point of a sunshade.) You met in the airless, shadowed salon of a Victorian villa, where an English novelist had invited everyone he could think of—friends and neighbors and strangers picked up in cafés—to hear a protégé of his playing Scriabin and Schubert through the hottest hours of the day.

You took one look at the ashy stranger and labeled him “the mooch.” He had already said he was a playwright. No one had asked, but in those days, the late Truman era, travelers from North America felt bound to explain why they weren’t back home and on the job. It seemed all right for a playwright to drift through Europe. You pictured him sitting in airports, taking down dialogue.

He had said, “What part of Canada are you from?”

You weren’t expecting this, because he sounded as if he came from some part of Canada, too. He should have known before asking that your answer could be brief and direct or cautious and reserved; you might say, “That’s hard to explain,” or even “I’m not sure what you mean.” You were so startled, in fact, that you missed four lines of the usual exchange and replied, “I wouldn’t know. Anyway, I don’t have much eye.”

He said, “I’d say you’ve got quite an eye …” and then turned to Edie: “How about you?”

“Oh, I’m not from any part of anything,” Edie said. “My people came from Poland.”

Now, you have already told her not to say this without
also
mentioning that her father was big in cement. At that time Poland just meant Polack. Chopin was dead. History hadn’t got round to John Paul II. She looked over your head at the big guy, the mooch. Fergus Bray was his name; the accent you had spotted but couldn’t place was Cape Breton Island. So that he wasn’t asking the usual empty question (empty because for most people virtually any answer was bound to be unrevealing) but making a social remark—the only social remark he will ever address to you.

You are not tall. Your head is large—not abnormally but remarkably. Once, at the beach, someone placed a child’s life belt with an inflated toy sea horse on your head, and it sat there, like Cleopatra’s diadem. Your wife laughed, with her mouth wide open, uncovering a few of the iron fillings they plugged kids’ teeth with during the Depression. You said, “Ah, that’s enough, Edie,” but your voice lacked authority. The first time you ever heard a recording of your own voice, you couldn’t figure out who that squeaker might be. Some showoff in London said you had a voice like H. G. Wells’—all but the accent. You have no objection to sounding like Wells. Your voice is the product of two or three generations of advanced university education, not made for bawling orders.

Today, nearly forty years later, no one would dare crown you with a sea-horse life belt or criticize your voice. You are Dr. Lapwing, recently retired as president of a prairie university called Osier, after having been for a long time the head of its English department. You still travel and publish. You have been presented to the Queen, and have lunched with a prime minister. He urged you to accept a cigar, and frowned with displeasure when you started to smoke.

To the Queen you said, “… and I also write books.”

“Oh?” said Her Majesty. “And do you earn a great deal of money from writing books?”

You started to give your opinion of the academic publishing crisis, but there were a number of other persons waiting,
and the Queen was obliged to turn away. You found this exchange dazzling. For ten minutes you became a monarchist, until you discovered that Her Majesty often asks the same question: “Do you earn a great deal of money with your poems, vaulting poles, copper mines, music scores?” The reason for the question must be that the answer cannot drag much beyond “Yes” or “No.” “Do you like writing books?” might bring on a full paragraph, and there isn’t time. You are proud that you tried to furnish a complete and truthful answer. You are once more anti-monarchist, and will not be taken in a second time.

The subject of your studies is still William Morris. Your metaphor is “frontiers.” You have published a number of volumes that elegantly combine your two preoccupations: “William Morris: Frontiers of Indifference.” “Continuity of a Frontier: The Young William Morris.” “Widening Frontiers: The Role of the Divine in William Morris.” “Secondary Transformations in William Morris: A Double Frontier.”

When you and Edie shook hands with the mooch for the first time, you were on a grant, pursuing your first Morris mirage. To be allowed to pursue anything for a year was a singular honor; grants were hard to come by. While you wrote and reflected, your books and papers spread over the kitchen table in the two-room dwelling you had rented in the oldest part of Rivebelle, your wife sat across from you, reading a novel. There was nowhere else for her to sit; the bedroom gave on a narrow medieval alley. You could not very well ask Edie to spend her life in the dark, or send her into the streets to be stared at by yokels. She didn’t object to the staring, but it disturbed you. You couldn’t concentrate, knowing that she was out there, alone, with men trying to guess what she looked like with her clothes off.

What was she reading? Not the thick, gray, cementlike Prix Goncourt novel you had chosen, had even cut the pages of, for her. You looked, and saw a French translation of
“Forever Amber.” She had been taught to read French by nuns—another problem; she was too Polish Catholic for your enlightened friends, and too flighty about religion to count as a mystic. To intellectual Protestants, she seemed to be one more lapsed Catholic without guilt or conviction.

“You shouldn’t be reading that. It’s trash.”

“It’s not trash. It’s a classic. The woman in the bookstore said so. It’s published in a classics series.”

“Maybe in France. Nowhere else in the civilized world.”

“Well, it’s their own business, isn’t it? It’s French.”

“Edie, it’s American. There was even a movie.”

“When?”

“I don’t know. Last year. Five years ago. It’s the kind of movie I wouldn’t be caught dead at.”

“Neither would I,” said Edie staunchly.

“Only the French would call that a classic.”

“Then what are we doing here?”

“Have you forgotten London? The bedbugs?”

“At least there was a scale in the room.”

Oh, yes; she used to scramble out of bed in London saying, “If you have the right kind of experience, it makes you lose weight.” The great innocence of her, crouched on the scale; hands on her knees, trying to read the British system. The best you could think of to say was “You’ll catch cold.”

“What’s a stone?” she would ask, frowning.

“I’ve already told you. It’s either seven or eleven or fourteen pounds.”

“Whatever it is, I haven’t lost anything.”

For no reason you knew, she suddenly stopped washing your nylon shirts in the kitchen sink and letting them drip in melancholy folds on
France-Soir
. You will never again see a French newspaper without imagining it blistered, as sallow in color as the shirts. The words “nylon shirt” will remind you of a French municipal-bonds scandal, a page-one story of the time. She ceased to shop, light the fire in the coal-and-wood
stove (the only kind of stove in your French kitchen), cook anything decent, wash the plates, carry out the ashes and garbage. She came to bed late, when she thought you had gone to sleep, put out her cigarette at your request, and hung on to her book, her thumb between the pages, while you tried to make love to her.

One night, speaking of Fergus Bray, you said, “Could you sleep with a creep like him?”

“Who, the mooch? I might, if he’d let me smoke.”

With this man she made a monkey of you, crossed one of your favorite figures of speech (“frontiers”) and vanished into Franco’s Spain. You, of course, will not set foot in Franco territory—not even to reclaim your lazy, commonplace, ignorant, Polack, lower-middle-class, gorgeous rose garden of a wife. Not for the moment.

I am twenty-seven, you say to yourself. She is nearly twenty-nine. When I am only thirty-eight, she will be pushing forty, and fat and apathetic. Those blond Slavs turn into pumpkins.

Well, she is gone. Look at it this way: you can work in peace, cross a few frontiers of your own, visit the places your political development requires—Latvia, Estonia, Poland. You join a French touring group, with a guide moonlighting from a celebrated language institute in Paris. (He doesn’t know Polish, it turns out; Edie might have been useful.) You make your Eastern rounds, eyes keen for the cultural flowering some of your friends have described to you. You see quite a bit of the beet harvest in Silesia, and return by way of London. At Canada House, you sign a fraudulent statement declaring the loss of your passport, and receive a new one. The idea is to get rid of every trace of your Socialist visas. Nothing has changed in the past few weeks. Your wife is still in Madrid. You know, now, that she has an address on Calle de Hortaleza, and that Fergus Bray has a wife named Monica in Glace Bay, Nova Scotia.

Your new passport announces, as the old one did, that a Canadian citizen is a British subject. You object, once again, to the high-handed assumption that a citizen doesn’t care what he is called. You would like to cross the words out with indelible ink, but the willful defacement of a piece of government property, following close on to a false statement made under oath, won’t do your career any good should it come to light. Besides, you may need the Brits. Canada still refuses to recognize the Franco regime. There is no embassy, no consulate in Madrid, just a man in an office trying to sell Canadian wheat. What if Fergus Bray belts you on the nose, breaks your glasses? You can always ring the British doorbell and ask for justice and revenge.

You pocket the clean passport and embark on a train journey requiring three changes. In Madrid you find Edie bedraggled, worn out, ready to be rescued. She is bare-legged, with canvas sandals tied on her feet. The mooch has pawned her wedding ring and sold her shoes in the flea market. You discover that she has been supporting the bastard—she who never found your generous grant enough for two, who used to go shopping with the francs you had carefully counted into her hand and return with nothing but a few tomatoes. Her beauty has coarsened, which gives you faith in abstract justice. You remind yourself that you are not groveling before this woman; you are taking her back, greasy hair, chapped skin, skinny legs, and all. Even the superb breasts seem lower and flatter, as well as you can tell under the cheap cotton dress she has on.

The mooch is out, prowling the city. “He does that a lot,” she says.

You choose a clean, reasonable restaurant and buy her a meal. With the first course (garlic soup) her beauty returns. While you talk, quietly, without a trace of rebuke, she goes on eating. She is listening, probably, but this steady gluttonous attention to food seems the equivalent of keeping her
thumb between the pages of “Forever Amber.” Color floods her cheeks and forehead. She finishes a portion of stewed chicken, licks her fingers, sweeps back her tangled hair. She seems much as before—cheerful, patient, glowing, just a little distracted.

Already, men at other tables are starting to glance at her—not just the Latins, who will stare at anyone, but decent tourists, the good kind, Swedes, Swiss, whose own wives are clean, smart, have better table manners. These men are gazing at Edie the way the mooch did that first time, when she looked back at him over your head. You think of Susanna and the Elders. You can’t tell her to cover up: the dress is a gunny-sack, nothing shows. You tell yourself that something must be showing.

All this on a bowl of soup, a helping of chicken, two glasses of wine. “I’m sure I look terrible,” she says. If she could, she would curl up on her chair and go to sleep. You cannot allow her to sleep, even in imagination. There is too much to discuss. She resists discussion. The two of you were apart, now you are back together. That seems to be all she wants to hear. She sighs, as if you were keeping her from something she craves (sleep?), and says, “It’s all right, Harry. Whatever it is you’ve done, I forgive you. I’ll never throw anything up to you. I’ve never held a grudge in my life.”

In plain terms, this is not a recollection but the memory of one, riddled with mistakes of false time and with hindsight. When Lapwing lost and found his wife, the Queen was a princess, John Paul II was barely out of a seminary, and Lapwing was edging crabwise toward his William Morris œuvre—for some reason, by way of a study of St. Paul. Stories about the passport fraud and how Fergus Bray is supposed to have sold Edie’s shoes had not begun to circulate. Lapwing’s try at engaging Her Majesty in conversation—a favorite academic
anecdote, perhaps of doubtful authenticity—was made some thirty years later.

Osier, when Lapwing started teaching, was a one-building college, designed by a nostalgic Old Country architect to reproduce a Glasgow train shed. In the library hung a map of Ulster and a photograph of Princess May of Teck on her wedding day; on the shelves was a history of England, in fifteen volumes, but none of Canada—or, indeed, of any part of North America. There were bound copies of
Maclean’s
, loose copies of
The Saturday Evening Post
, and a row of prewar British novels in brown, plum, and deep-blue bindings, reinforced with tape—the legacy of an alumnus who had gone away to die in Bermuda. From the front windows, Lapwing could see mud and a provincial highway; from the back, a basketball court and the staff parking lot. Visiting Soviet agricultural experts were always shown round the lot, so that they could count the spoils of democracy. Lapwing was the second Canadian-educated teacher ever to be hired; the first, Miss Mary MacLeod, a brilliant Old Testament scholar, taught Nutrition and Health. She and Lapwing shared Kraft-cheese sandwiches and subversive minority conversation. After skinning alive the rest of the staff, Miss MacLeod would remember Universal Vision and say it was probably better to have a lot of Brits than a lot of Americans. Americans would never last a winter up here. They were too rich and spoiled.