Montreal Stories (8 page)

“Blue.” His voice broke out of a whisper all at once. His eyes were mocking me, like a kid seeing how far he can go. I thought he would thank me now, but then I said to myself, You can’t expect anything; he’s a sick man, and he was always like this.

“Most people think it was pretty good of me to have come here,” I wanted to explain—not to boast or anything, but just for the sake of conversation. I was lonely there, and I had so much trouble understanding what anybody was saying.

“Bad night,” my father whispered. “Need sedation.”

“I know. I tried to tell the doctor. I guess he doesn’t understand my French.”

He moved his head. “Tip the nurses.”

“You don’t mean it!”

“Don’t make me talk.” He seemed to be using a reserve of breath. “At least twenty dollars. The ward girls less.”

I said, “Jesus God!” because this was new to me and I felt out of my depth. “They don’t bother much with you,” I said, talking myself into doing it. “Maybe you’re right. If I gave them a present, they’d look after you more. Wash you.
Maybe they’d put a screen around you—you’d be more private then.”

“No, thanks,” my father said. “No screen. Thanks all the same.”

We had one more conversation after that. I’ve already said there were always women slopping around in the ward, in felt slippers, and bathrobes stained with medicine and tea. I came in and found one—quite young, this one was—combing my father’s hair. He could hardly lift his head from the pillow, and still she thought he was interesting. I thought, Kenny should see this.

“She’s been telling me,” my father gasped when the woman had left. “About herself. Three children by different men. Met a North African. He adopts the children, all three. Gives them his name. She has two more by him, boys. But he won’t put up with a sick woman. One day he just doesn’t come. She’s been a month in another place; now they’ve brought her here. Man’s gone. Left the children. They’ve been put in all different homes, she doesn’t know where. Five kids. Imagine.”

I thought, You left
us
. He had forgotten; he had just simply forgotten that he’d left his own.

“Well, we can’t do anything about her, can we?” I said. “She’ll collect them when she gets out of here.”

“If she gets out.”

“That’s no way to talk,” I said. “Look at the way she was talking and walking around …” I could not bring myself to say “and combing your hair.” “Look at how
you
are,” I said. “You’ve just told me this long story.”

“She’ll seem better, but she’ll get worse,” my father said. “She’s like me, getting worse. Do you think I don’t know what kind of ward I’m in? Every time they put the screen around a patient, it’s because he’s dying. If I had TB, like they tried to make me believe, I’d be in a TB hospital.”

“That just isn’t true,” I said.

“Can you swear I’ve got TB? You can’t.”

I said without hesitating, “You’ve got a violent kind of TB. They had no place else to put you except here. The ward might be crummy, but the medicine … the medical care …” He closed his eyes. “I’m looking you straight in the face,” I said, “and I swear you have this unusual kind of TB, and you’re almost cured.” I watched, without minding it now, a new kind of bug crawling along the base of the wall.

“Thanks, Billy,” said my father.

I really was scared. I had been waiting for something without knowing what it would mean. I can tell you how it was: It was like the end of the world.

“I didn’t realize you were worried,” I said. “You should of asked me right away.”

“I knew you wouldn’t lie to me,” my father said. “That’s why I wanted you, not the others.”

That was all. Not long after that, he couldn’t talk. He had deserted his whole family once, but I was the one he abandoned twice. When he died, a nurse said to me, “I am sorry.” It had no meaning, from her, yet only a few days before, it was all I thought I wanted to hear.

O
N NEW YEAR’S
Eve the Plummers took Amabel to the opera.

“Whatever happens tonight happens every day for a year,” said Amabel, feeling secure because she had a Plummer on either side.

Colonel Plummer’s car had broken down that afternoon; he had got his wife and their guest punctually to the Bolshoi Theater, through a storm, in a bootleg taxi. Now he discovered from his program that the opera announced was neither of those they had been promised.

His wife leaned across Amabel and said, “Well, which is it?” She could not read any Russian and would not try.

She must have known it would take him minutes to answer, for she sat back, settled a width of gauzy old shawl on her neck, and began telling Amabel the relative sizes of the Bolshoi and some concert hall in Vancouver the girl had never heard of. Then, because it was the Colonel’s turn to speak, she shut her eyes and waited for the overture.

The Colonel was gazing at the program and putting off the moment when he would have to say that it was
Ivan Susanin
, a third choice no one had so much as hinted at. He wanted to convey that he was sorry and that the change was not his fault. He took bearings: He was surrounded by women. To his left sat the guest, who mewed like a kitten, who had been a friend of his daughter’s, and whose name he could not remember. On the right, near the aisle, two quiet
unknown girls were eating fruit and chocolates. These two smelled of oranges; of clothes worn a long time in winter; of light recent sweat; of women’s hair. Their arms were large and bare. When the girl closest to him moved slightly, he saw a man’s foreign wristwatch. He wondered who she was, and how the watch had come to her, but he had been here two years now—long enough to know he would never be answered. He also wondered if the girls were as shabby as his guest found everyone in Moscow. His way of seeing women was not concerned with that sort of evidence: Shoes were shoes, a frock was a frock.

The girls took no notice of the Colonel. He was invisible to them, wiped out of being by a curtain pulled over the inner eye.

He felt his guest’s silence, then his wife’s. The visitor’s profile was a kitten’s, to match her voice. She was twenty-two, which his Catherine would never be. Her gold dress, packed for improbable gala evenings, seemed the size of a bathing suit. She was divorcing someone, or someone in Canada had left her—he remembered that, but not her name.

He moved an inch or two to the left and muttered, “It’s
Ivan.
”

“What?” cried his wife. “What did you say?”

In the old days, before their Catherine had died, when the Colonel’s wife was still talking to him, he had tried to hush her in public places sometimes, and so the habit of loudness had taken hold.

“It isn’t
Boris
. It isn’t
Igor
. It’s
Ivan
. They must both have had sore throats.”

“Oh, well, bugger it,” said his wife.

Amabel supposed that the Colonel’s wife had grown peculiar through having lived so many years in foreign parts. Having no one to speak to, she conversed alone. Half of Mrs. Plummer’s character was quite coarse, though a finer Mrs. Plummer somehow kept order. Low-minded Mrs. Plummer
chatted amiably and aloud with her high-minded twin—far more pleasantly than the whole of Mrs. Plummer ever talked to anybody.

“Serves you right,” she said.

Amabel gave a little jump. She wondered if Mrs. Plummer’s remark had anything to do with the opera. She turned her head cautiously. Mrs. Plummer had again closed her eyes.

The persistence of memory determines what each day of the year will be like, the Colonel’s wife decided. Not what happens on New Year’s Eve. This morning I was in Moscow; between the curtains snow was falling. The day had no color. It might have been late afternoon. Then the smell of toast came into my room and I was back in my mother’s dining room in Victoria, with the gros-point chairs and the framed embroidered grace on the wall. A little girl I had been ordered to play with kicked the baseboard, waiting for us to finish our breakfast. A devilish little boy, Hume something, was on my mind. I was already attracted to devils; I believed in their powers. My mother’s incompetence about choosing friends for me shaped my life, because that child, who kicked the baseboard and left marks on the paint …

When she and her husband had still been speaking, this was how Frances Plummer had talked. She had offered him hours of reminiscence, and the long personal thoughts that lead to quarrels. In those days red wine had made her aggressive, whiskey made him vague.

Not only vague, she corrected; stubborn too.
Speak?
said one half of Mrs. Plummer to the other. Did we speak? We yelled!

The quiet twin demanded a fairer portrait of the past, for she had no memory.

Oh, he was a shuffler, back and forth between wife and mistress, said the virago, who had forgotten nothing. He’d desert one and then leave the other—flag to flag, false convert, double agent, reason why a number of women had long,
hilly conversations, like the view from a train—monotonous, finally. That was the view a minute ago, you’d say. Yes, but look now.

The virago declared him incompetent; said he had shuffled from embassy to embassy as well, pushed along by a staunch ability to retain languages, an untiring recollection of military history and wars nobody cared about. What did he take with him? His wife, for one thing. At least she was here, tonight, at the opera. Each time they changed countries he supervised the packing of a portrait of his mother, wearing white, painted when she was seventeen. He had nothing of Catherine’s: When Catherine died, Mrs. Plummer gave away her clothes and her books, and had her little dog put to sleep.

How did it happen? In what order? said calm Mrs. Plummer. Try and think it in order. He shuffled away one Easter; came shuffling back; and Catherine died. It is useless to say “Serves you right,” for whatever served him served you.

The overture told Amabel nothing, and by the end of the first act she still did not know the name of the opera or understand what it was about. Earlier in the day the Colonel had said, “There is some uncertainty—sore throats here and there. The car, now—you can see what has happened. It doesn’t start. If our taxi should fail us, and isn’t really a taxi, we might arrive at the Bolshoi too late for me to do anything much in the way of explaining. But you can easily figure it out for yourself.” His mind cleared; his face lightened. “If you happen to see Tartar dances, then you will know it is
Igor
. Otherwise it is
Boris.
”

The instant the lights rose, Amabel thrust her program at him and said, “What does that mean?”

“Why,
Ivan
.
It’s
Ivan.”

“There are two words, aren’t there?”

“Yes. What’s-His-Name had a sore throat, d’you see? We
knew it might all be changed at any moment. It was clever of them to get these printed in time.”

Mrs. Plummer, who looked like the Red Queen sometimes, said, “A life for the tsar,” meanwhile staring straight ahead of her.

“Used to be, used to be,” said the Colonel, and he smiled at Amabel, as if to say to her, “Now you know.”

The Plummers did not go out between acts. They never smoked, were seldom thirsty or hungry, and they hated crowds. Amabel stood and stretched so that the Russians could appreciate her hair, her waist, her thin arms, and, for those lucky enough to glimpse them, her thighs. After a moment or two Mrs. Plummer thought the Russians had appreciated Amabel enough, and she said very loudly, “You might be more comfortable sitting down.”

“
Lakmé
is coming,” said the Colonel, for it was his turn to speak. “It’s far and away my favorite opera. It makes an awful fool of the officer caste.” This was said with ambiguous satisfaction. He was not really disowning himself.

“How does it do that?” said Amabel, who was not more comfortable sitting down.

“Why, an officer runs off with the daughter of a temple priest. No one would ever have got away with that. Though the military are awful fools most of the time.”

“You’re that class—caste, I mean—aren’t you?”

The Colonel supposed that like most people he belonged to the same caste as his father and mother. His father had worn a wig and been photographed wearing it just before he died. His mother, still living, rising eighty, was given to choked melancholy laughter over nothing, a habit carried over from a girlhood of Anglican giggling. It was his mother the Colonel had wanted in Moscow this Christmas—not Amabel. He had wanted to bring her even if it killed her; even if she choked to death on her own laughter as she shook tea out of a cup because her hand trembled, or if she laughed and
said, “My dear boy, nobody forced you to marry Frances.” The Colonel saw himself serene, immune to reminders; observed a new Colonel Plummer crowned with a wig, staring out of a photograph, in the uniform his father had worn at Vimy Ridge; sure of himself and still, faded to a plain soft neutral color; unhearing, at peace—dead, in short. He had dreamed of sending the plane ticket, of meeting his mother at the airport with a fur coat over his arm in case she had come dressed for the wrong winter; had imagined giving her tea and watching her drink it out of a glass set in a metal base decorated all over with Soviet cosmonauts; had sat beside her here, at the Bolshoi, at a performance of
Eugene Onegin
, which she once had loved. It seemed fitting that he now do some tactful, unneeded, appreciated thing for her, at last—she who had never done anything for him.

One evening his wife had looked up from the paperback spy novel she was reading at dinner and—having waited for him to notice she was neither eating nor turning pages—remarked that Amabel Bacon, who had been Amabel Fisher, that pretty child Catherine roomed with in school, had asked if she might come to them for ten days at Christmas.

“Nothing for children here,” he said. “And not much space.”

“She must be twenty-two,” said his wife, “and can stay in a hotel.”

They stared at each other, as if they were strangers in a crush somewhere and her earring had caught on his coat. Their looks disentangled. That night Mrs. Plummer wrote to Amabel saying that they did not know any young people; that Mrs. Plummer played bridge from three to six every afternoon; that the Colonel was busy at the embassy; that it was difficult to find seats at the ballet; that it was too cold for sight-seeing; Lenin’s tomb was temporarily closed; there was nothing in the way of shopping; the Plummers, not being
great mixers, avoided parties; they planned to spend a quiet Christmas and New Year’s; and Amabel was welcome.