Lost in September

by Kathleen Winter

  Its plain frock tones down the gorgeousness of the red so that while arresting, it fails to incite fear or untoward attention or ridicule. Its subdued tailoring keeps the garment elegant and respectable as my coat of 1759. It’s a classic design and I’ve always been proud of it.

  I feel certain, as I smooth the creases from its having been sandwiched between the bouffant hoopla of ballgowns and the severity of hospital uniforms, the busker would not have dared assault me had I been wearing it.

  The south edge of the city of Montreal opens onto what they call the Old Port, but the only old thing there, once you reach the water, is the bridges. The bridges are rickety. They are falling apart. I love the way the Champlain bridge sits squat and cantilevered over the water like an architectural mushroom, sturdy yet lightened by spokes and spans and strips that underpin its upper arc.

  To feel the slightest bit human, I have to look at the bridges instead of at what city planners have done with the Old Port. They have covered it in cement: angled, vertical, stretching for officialdom. There is no place on this part of the Saint Lawrence River where a man can regain a feeling of nature. You have to go west for that, toward the Mercier Bridge and the Mohawks.

  I fervently wish to find Harold again, he in his yellow clothes, me in this red coat: together we’d be like a caution light and a stop signal joining forces to halt my old sadness. Dare blues try and barge through such a blaze?

  15 Umbrellas

  THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 7.

  EVENING.

  Mont Royal. Montreal, Quebec

  AT NIGHTFALL IN THE TENT, Sophie seems unimpressed with me.

  “What’s the matter with you? You’re jittery. You’re unfocused. You haven’t been to see Madame Bee at all, have you?”

  “I went to buy a ticket but—”

  “But but but. You didn’t go and see her but you did something. What was it?”

  “I’ll go to see Madame Blanchard. Tomorrow…”

  Is the old walrus on Sophie’s tent moving? She’s done something to its eyes so they find me like eyes in a portrait gallery, which I find disconcerting. She has painted, in the sea and around the walrus, some new small fish and weeds and flames of blue and green. I wish I could dive in. My coat glares in the half-light. Red is not a colour that merges with the walrus’s colours. Red wants to subjugate other colours but here in the tent it cannot.

  “You’re preoccupied with something or someone—you have been since Tuesday—who is it?”

  I fear that if I risk telling Sophie about Harold or Mrs. Waugh she’ll want to know all the details and give a verdict before I’ve had time, myself, to decide how I feel. But if I don’t come up with something to appease her she’ll wear me out with her questions, well-meaning, all of them, but…

  “I was thinking about my mother. Her pretty miniatures—”

  “Henrietta?”

  “She kept them on a tray to look at when she couldn’t sleep.”

  “For God’s sake.”

  “She did! She had a miniature shoe, an infinitesimal harpsichord and even an umbrella, though no one in England had a real umbrella then.”

  “They had. England invented bloody umbrellas.”

  “You’re wrong.”

  “Babies in England are born with tiny umbrellas attached to their thumbs.”

  “When I brought an umbrella home from my leave in Paris I was the only person in Blackheath in possession of one. I was laughed at.”

  “A likely tale. Did you find that story in the library?”

  “It’s true! You know I still love umbrellas. Umbrellas have always struck me as graceful, multi-purposed. Do you not want my tales anymore?”

  “I want you to get better. And for that, I need your tales to ring true.”

  “But can I tell you an umbrella story? I admit this is not mine, it’s about a man called Ears, and I did find it in the library—I was searching under M for my old friend Sir John Mordaunt but I got waylaid by Maupassant: his story in which a man named Ears longs to buy an umbrella but his wife won’t let him…it explains how I feel about umbrellas—I find them important and poignant.”

  “This is one of those times I wish I was a baleen,” Sophie says.

  “What?”

  “Whales are blessed with natural self-forming earplugs.”

  “I’m not talking about ears or whales or their earplugs, I’m trying to tell you about a man named Ears.”

  “The lack of self-regulating noise intake is a basic design flaw in the human body.”

  “Sophie, hear me out? The man named Ears went to work in his office every day, carrying his pathetic, cheap umbrella, patched and so worn that his workmates made up a hateful song about it and chanted it cruelly every time he walked past.”

  “…What were the words to this cruel song?”

  “Maupassant didn’t say.”

  “Can’t you make them up?”

  “I don’t make things up.”

  “Oh. I see.”

  “The story, Maupassant’s story, is that Ears begged his wife to hold back some of the housekeeping money to buy him a new umbrella, and she was so miserable she could hardly speak…”

  “Please,” Sophie rolls away and pulls the sleeping bag tight over her head, “spare me the miserable, nagging wife.”

  So, I keep to myself the heartbreaking tale of how Ears’ wife finally allowed him to spend eighteen francs on a new silk umbrella, only to have a catastrophe happen the very next day: somehow, ashes from a cigar burnt a hole through his glorious new umbrella in the cloak-room while he slaved away on his sums.

  Did a malicious coworker do this on purpose?

  Maupassant did not specify.

  Terrible consternation ensued, with the wife refusing to help in any way except by making a claim with the family’s insurance company. The man at the insurance office tried to tell her they did not reimburse people for burnt umbrellas—she needed her whole house burnt down.

  Ah, replied the wife—but we did have a house fire some time ago and did not report it: if you refuse to pay for my husband’s umbrella to be mended, we will have no choice but to make that far larger claim…

  And so on, until finally the insurance clerk acquiesced: she could have the umbrella recovered in the best silk. And so she did, telling the repairman that money was no object.

  This story immensely saddens me, and because Sophie refuses to listen I am left alone with it, as I am left alone with so many heartbreaking stories.

  “Only your own story can cure you,” Sophie mutters after a few minutes of silence. “Umbrellas have changed. Purple LED lights fly up and down their sticks. They don’t cost half a month’s wages and nobody patches them with silk. I told you to understand the past, not worm deeper in.”

  “But Maupassant’s story is from 1884, a hundred and twenty-five years after my death.”

  “Get with the new.”

  “Might you prefer the umbrella story in Howards End?”

  “Whose end?”

  “E.M. Forster. Is the twentieth century up-to-date enough for you?”

  “Never mind Howard’s end, what about yours? Where is Jimmy B going to end up? You’d better get a move on or I’ll be here until the apocalypse listening to him drone on about umbrellas.”

  “But Howards End is my story, or at least very like an important part of it…a rich woman with a luxuriant umbrella accidentally takes a poor man’s decrepit umbrella home from a concert, and when they try to return the objects to each other it creates a doomed romantic upheaval nearly identical to the way I lost Eliza….”

  “Eliza Lawson? Again? Oh, Jimmy. I’m ready for you to leave if you can’t do any better than this after all the time I’ve spent with you, trying to get you to face what really haunts you.”

  In fact, there has not been a September in the last eleven years when Sophie hasn’t uttered this very thing. If I don’t give her a grain of truth now and then, she loses all heart.

  So. “I met a blu
e man…”

  Blue, yellow…a story sounds true no matter what the colour, as long as there is a colour and the colour is pure.

  “See? I knew you met somebody today. I could tell from your face, from your whole body. I knew somebody had you mixed up about time again. Harking all the way back to the invention of friggin’ umbrellas. Pulling you safely away from here and now. How much time do you expect me to squander listening to pointless tales that only distract you from the truth?”

  “It wasn’t today I met the blue man. But I thought about him all afternoon. And it’s true, he did get me thinking of time, going back and forth in time, instead of doing what you want me to do, like visiting Madame Blanchard.”

  “A blue man.”

  “He was all dressed in blue.”

  “A blue man from the desert? Are you finally talking to me about the desert?”

  “Not the desert. The blue man was in the field behind our house in Westerham. I was playing with George.”

  “Oh.” She slumps. “You and Westerham and Henrietta and George Warde. You and Eliza and England and king what’s-his-name.”

  “He had a wool hat on, though it was the middle of summer, and he was hunched over but he had bright blue quick eyes, and he wagged his finger at me to c’mere. I tried to get George to come over with me but he wouldn’t.

  “ ‘Would you like to know three things,’ the man asked me, ‘that will let you have the life you really want?’

  “ ‘Yes please.’

  “ ‘Good! You’re a good boy. Well, the first thing is, you have to set a goal, and you have to make a little change every day towards it—that’s called increments—you make an incremental change and you do it every day. Have you got that?’

  “ ‘I think so.’

  “ ‘The second thing is, if you had one pound and you doubled it the next day, and you doubled the amount you had every day from then on, how long would it take before you have a million pounds?’

  “ ‘I don’t know.’ ”

  “Damn right you don’t know,” interrupts Sophie.

  “I can’t remember exactly how many days the man said. He mentioned the number twenty-one. But I can’t remember if he meant it would take twenty-one days of doubling to reach a million, or if the twenty-one days were the amount of days things remained slow but after which a stupendous increase exploded the numbers. I’ve never sat down to work it out.”

  “I know you haven’t,” Sophie says. “You never work anything out concerning money. Even the miserable lump sum Madame Blanchard shamed the Department of Veterans Affairs into sending you a couple of years ago, what did you do? Hey? Blew it on another useless—”

  “It was exactly enough to revisit my birthplace, Westerham—I had to go!”

  “Wolfe’s birthplace. Not yours. You don’t know where you were born, that’s—”

  “ ‘I tell you this about the pounds,’ the blue man said, ‘in case you’re afraid of money. You should never be frightened of coin. It is the foundation of everything men do. Everyone wants it, and nobody talks about it. It isn’t just people who hide the fact that they want it—countries tell all kinds of stories to pretend they want magic jewels and magic kingdoms and palaces full of genies and spellbinding belly-dancers and even fairies and fish with scales made of silver and gold, but what the countries want is the same as what all the people want, which is money, and you mustn’t be afraid of it or you’ll miss the boat.’ ”

  “Exactly!” Sophie cries. “Bring me that fucking blue man now. Where the hell have you left him?”

  “Then he said, ‘It’s money that everything else comes from: Love, far-off enchanted lands, and all the things I’ve just mentioned, even God. You know how pretty church windows are, with all their lovely coloured glass?’

  “I said I did. I was watching George, who was pulling his toy horse toward his house. It was nearly our dinner-time and my tummy was rumbling. Betty was making rhubarb and custard, my favourite.”

  “Jesus, Jimmy,” moans Sophie. “What am I gonna do with you?”

  “ ‘Well,’ the blue man said, ‘even the churches, with their love of God, really underneath it all know about money and are always thinking about it all the time. You can’t go anywhere or do anything big or grand or even good, without it. So don’t forget that, it’s the second thing. Now, what do you think the third thing is?’

  “ ‘I don’t know,’ I said. Remember, I was only a child.

  “He bent close to me and said, ‘You have to go back in time, not just forward. Do you know how to do that?’

  “ ‘No.’

  “ ‘It’s easy. Remember the first thing I told you, about making a goal and doing something, some little change, an incremental change, each and every day towards it? Say incremental.’

  “ ‘Incremental.’

  “ ‘Good. Well, you have to cast your imagination forward now, to the point you’re envisioning in five years, ten years, or however long it will be until that future day when your goal is within reach. Can you imagine you’re there?’

  “ ‘I think so.’

  “I was getting tired of him and I couldn’t really imagine it, but I wanted to let him get to the end of his lesson so I could go home and play with my dogs and have rabbit pie and then some pudding.

  “ ‘Place yourself there,’ he said, ‘with your goal plucked and in your hand, in the future, and now, using that same imagination, look back in time and see what you must have in place a year before the goal is reached, then two years, and so on, so that you can see the steps from your future goal, back in time, until now. Once you have done that, you will know what to do along your way to get the life you really want. Now that’s it. Now go, and have your good life.’

  “And with an abrupt hand-wave like a magician completing his enchantment, the man in blue dismissed me. I wasn’t dreaming, I saw it all clearly, and I remember him and his words better than I remember many other things from when I was very young—and I could smell Betty’s pie and custard. He was gone, and I didn’t think of him again except for a few fleeting moments today, when I guess I was thinking of someone or something that reminded me of him.”

  “Someone passing by on the street?” Sophie demands.

  “Something or someone…it doesn’t matter.”

  “Oh,” says Sophie, “it does matter. I think it matters very much.”

  16 Madame Blanchard

  FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 8.

  AFTERNOON.

  A suburb. Montreal, Quebec

  MADAME BLANCHARD WILL HAVE HAD her lunch by the time I arrive at La Residence Dernière Rose. Lunch is at noon, supper at five, bedtime at nine thirty. Wakeup at eight and a boiled egg with tea tasting of chlorine at eight thirty. By arriving in the afternoon I’ll avoid having to interrupt her meal.

  When I last visited Madame Blanchard—is Sophie right, can it really have been two years ago?—the nurses had moved her to a smaller room. At least she still had a window: it looked out on a golf course and poplars that waved their tops like overgrown woolly pipe cleaners. The dark trees absorbed light from the sky, while the golf course flared a hot lime, but her view was an improvement on that of her previous room that had faced the parking lot.

  How eager she’d been to struggle with me around that gravel lot, gripping her walker, bent over it, determined to make the full circle, though no one had planted so much as a clump of daylilies at its border. For an English war bride to be without her garden is, I think, a cruel fate. A bell warned staff we’d gone outside. They seemed to ignore it. I had the feeling Madame Blanchard could disappear onto Boulevard de Salaberry and none of them would notice.

  With her war-bride cheer she made her circuit as if enjoying a day in Connaught Park. Her high voice, her wispy hair and house-dress, and the loafers that did not sting her bunions—no one outside her tiny domain saw the woman I knew. For a glimpse of that, one had to be admitted to her room, with its lemon geranium, her ceramic dor
mice, made in her childhood home of Staffordshire, and books all over the floor. The staff was forever devising tricks to rid her of those books. Dust traps, they said. You’ll break the other hip.

  In her own house she’d tended gooseberries, brambles, and a weeping birch under whose branches I read all afternoon concealed from crow or gull or any human other than herself as she brought me something nice to drink. She remained obliviously English despite half a lifetime in the New World. Her rock garden. Her sage and onion stuffing. Neighbours had a little laugh about this behind her back. Now the staff at the home hardly noticed it. When a woman reaches her nineties no one sees what came before her diapers, her sleeping pills, the ghost-white cup-ring on her night table.

  —

  TODAY, SUZETTE CROUCHES OVER THE reception desk eating a whistle-dog from the A&W down the hill. A stink of liver bathes the corridor, it being Friday. Madame Blanchard does not eat liver. Instead she has the staff prepare her a chicken fillet.

  “I’ll see myself in…” I turn toward room 219 but Suzette waves no and the supervisor with striped hair comes out of her office.

  “We tried to telephone,” she says. I always have to surreptitiously check her nametag—Gisele Thunay-Dufresne. “What happened to your face?”

  “Nothing.” I do not feel like explaining about the busker’s flute.

  “Wait here while I get the correspondence we tried to send to you.”

  She retrieves three cancelled envelopes, all addressed to myself, two to the Gaspé postal box whose payments I failed to keep up after Madame Blanchard left the old house to be cared for here, and one addressed to the Mission this past June while I was not yet in the city. “We knew from your instructions that this last one was unlikely to reach you.” She hands it to me. “But you gave us no alternative. We trusted someone there might know a forwarding address. I’ve warned you something like this might happen.”

  She flicks a lacquered nail while I open the envelope and take in its contents.

  It is true that the time Madame Blanchard fell and broke her hip, it took a couple of months before I found out. The Gisele Thunay-Dufresnes of the world believe this to be neglect on my part.