Lost in September

by Kathleen Winter

  I haven’t seen anything close to that gaze anywhere except on the battlefield itself, in the eyes of a brother soldier, each prepared to die for the other.

  Harold has given me Veronica to accompany me while I clean up Madame Blanchard’s house and sell it. He has loaned me her bottomless understanding.

  “How do you think,” he asked as we parted on Abraham’s Plains, “I came to understand who you really are?”

  They call her a seeing-eye dog, he said, but she will show you what can’t be seen except by fathomless observation.

  He gave me her green leash and red harness.

  He gave me her snow-boots and her bag of Working Friend. The salmon-flavoured one, her second-favourite next to the flounder and other wild foods that I will be able to feed her through the fall and into February, there being no shortage of fish and hares in our cove.

  I have always loved dogs.

  You can sell a Gaspé house to Americans these days. You won’t get much for it, hardly more than twenty thousand if you’re lucky, but someone will love that house, if only in the summers. Someone who’s never had to live in it alone with Ghundy Ghar.

  The hills become massive and snow-bedecked, the sky bigger, the sun lofty overhead. More rivulets. The round-topped hills give way to tableland hilltops, flatter, and clouds catch along their edges. All the lines of the earth are sweeping, undulating—rich, dark browns and tans and the reddish-dark heath-shrub, and always water glittering, snaking, or standing in little puddles in and around the pockets and creases and bog-veins of the terrain. Steep inclines, but with gentle, sweeping hollows.

  Veronica—are you with me?

  OCTOBER 5, 2017

  RUE DROLET,

  MONTREAL

  Dear Jimmy Blanchard,

  When you and I met, a year ago at the Fisher Library, I was, I confess, ready to dismiss you. I tried to concentrate on Wolfe’s letters, on the man who died, in 1759, on the Plains of Abraham. I did not, at first, take into serious consideration the idea that you might have anything to add to my understanding of an English general who belongs to history.

  Forgive me. I have finally met Monsieur Hippolyte Choinière, the handwriting expert!

  He went on Tuesday to spend the morning perusing the following original documents in the archives at the McCord Museum:

  • a letter Wolfe wrote to a Mr. Weston on December 29, 1741, when Wolfe would have been fourteen years old;

  • a letter written at age twenty-eight from Southampton to his Uncle Walter on September 15, 1755, four years before the siege at Quebec;

  • Wolfe’s personal, handwritten Quebec journal, lost for many years, written during the siege, out of which Wolfe is said to have torn some of the pages complaining about his insubordinate officers. I believe this may be the journal to which Heather Forest at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library referred when I first visited her.

  I met Monsieur Choinière beside the glass archive doors as he unlocked them with his security card: he presented a joyful, enthusiastic countenance. We went for lunch at a sushi café around the corner and spent several hours discussing his findings.

  I began to divine that his work runs along two threads and that his main work now, which takes him to Poland and Paris and South America and China and other places, is the forensic work of authenticating handwriting in cases of disputed fraud. His other line, that of psychological analysis or personality assessment of a script’s author, was prevalent throughout the seventies: large corporations used to hire him to read over the CVS of job applicants and offer his opinion on the best candidates, and the employers hired or did not hire accordingly. This psychological or graphological aspect, which I wanted him to do for the handwriting of Wolfe, is not so much in demand as it was. This only made me more interested in it. I liked the idea of Monsieur Choinière dusting off and exercising his psychoanalytic skills on James Wolfe’s behalf.

  Still, there was a forensic gleam in Monsieur Choinière’s eye: apparently the authenticity of Wolfe’s Quebec journal, the one that resides at the McCord Museum in Montreal, has been disputed.

  He showed me an article from Le Soleil of July 12, 2009, headlined Les mystérieux journaux du général Wolfe. It described how there are two other existing documents that claim to be Wolfe’s original: one in the National Archives in Ottawa, and the other at the Royal Military College in Kingston. He would go, Monsieur Choinière told me, to see if these journals would confirm what he already suspected after his perusal this morning. He did not believe the McCord had in its budget the means to pay for such an investigation, but he would do it because he believed it had to be done.

  The sushi restaurant had the only quiet nook in the neighbourhood, which is full of noisy eateries with Formica chairs scraping the floors amid a cacophony of McGill students hollering over their falafels. I ordered an avocado roll and Monsieur Choinière requested salmon sushi that arrived bearing a very pretty translucent scattering of roe. We asked for Perrier. We slid the sushi aside and arranged his knapsack and papers, and my notebooks and pencil stubs and my pencil sharpener, across the table from each other.

  When, a few days ago, I explained this rendezvous to my next-door neighbour, Lilliane, she asked, “Have you checked his credentials?” I replied that I was not worried at all about Monsieur Choinière’s credentials: as far as I’m concerned, if a person wants to devote his life to the analysis of handwriting, then I believe he is sincere and has something of interest to say, though it might appear unusual or even improbable to some. Now I took delight in Monsieur Choinière’s face, which brimmed throughout our interview with an overflow of joie de vivre that made him appear youthful, though he told me that as long ago as the mid-1960s he was employed as a social worker three hundred miles north of Edmonton.

  “How did you go from being a social worker,” I asked him, “to becoming a handwriting expert?”

  He replied, “If you knew my aunt Iris, you would understand.” His aunt Iris, he said, had possessed a ceinture fléchée—the traditional woven fur-trader’s belt dating from Wolfe’s century—and would wear it every year in the Carnaval de Québec parade. “She was red-cheeked,” he said. “She was one of these people who you look at, and you want to smile. With her you knew you would have fun.”

  Iris was a nurse and a schoolteacher but during a time when Monsieur Choinière rented a room from her in his early twenties, she took a correspondence course in handwriting analysis. “She had such magnetism,” he recalled. “She saw that I’m very curious—and I was interested in her mysterious course. With her firm voice, she told me, ‘Hippolyte, you would be good at this!’ And that idea stayed with me.”

  I had been wondering if his name was really Hippolyte, as it had appeared on his emails to me; now the answer delighted me.

  Through a succession of social work and Children’s Aid jobs in the North and in Muskoka and other places, he continued to study handwriting. “My sister was going to Haiti,” he said. “She’d bought a blue convertible Volkswagen and she said, ‘Come with me to Miami and keep the car and drive it back home.’ On that trip I stopped in every library: Florida, the Library of Congress, University of Toronto….I rented rooms and studied on my own.”

  He went to California and to France to learn more, and in 1976 he attended an international congress of handwriting experts in Paris, as an independent participant. “I knew who I wanted to meet,” he told me. At the conference were all the heavy-hitters of handwriting analysis: syndicate vice presidents, forensic graphologists, foreign correspondents for La Graphologie, a handwriting analysis journal published from 1871 to the present day. He had read all their works. These people invited him for cocktails and he eventually became a correspondent for the journal.

  “I have a complete set of every journal they have published since the beginning,” he told me. Since then, his handwriting analysis work has taken him to Tanzania, Belgium and Chile. He has testified for international penal tribunals and entered the archives of C
arl Jung with a concealed spy camera.

  Now, over our sushi rolls, he began to tell me his findings on Wolfe.

  “I’m a movement translator,” he said. “Handwriting is frozen movement. The page is the stage. My work is to animate that life on the stage. I am meeting the person.

  “I’m asking questions of the page. My first question is to ask what is common to Wolfe’s time and what belongs to him personally. For example, in the letter he wrote at age fourteen in 1741, even within the restrictions of that age, I can see what we call the pastosity—a muddiness—that means he was probably, as a teenager, discovering his own sexuality. It’s unexpressed but present. Later it’s the same with some of his emotion. He shows a conflict between being sentimental or emotional and being a man of action. With select people he can be affectionate. The feelings are there.

  “His environment, in the army, is not the place to express his feelings. Within him I can see that possible ambivalence between feeling and thinking. It’s like somebody who has a coat of armour. In nature you have the porcupine. Don’t touch it! But then, the meat is so tender. It’s the same with Wolfe.

  “Did he idealize his lovers? With this type of personality, if he comes too close to the real person he’s afraid of his own emotions. Psychologically, he is not really in touch with his emotions. We see this with the priest who loves the Virgin Mary—he channels his emotions there, and she won’t challenge them. He expresses his emotions through reason.”

  Monsieur Choinière explained that in Wolfe’s handwriting there is equilibrium between form and movement. While his fourteen-year-old handwriting is closer to a “copy-book” rendition of schoolboys’ handwriting of that age—with, for example, flourishes on the letter D—it nevertheless betrays personality and is congruent with his later writing.

  “It’s angular, and it has irregularities. I see the strong influence of his environment—he’s not a hippie of his time: he will fit in with society, but with enough individuality to be his own man. He’s a man of action. What strikes me is the overall organization of the page: he can see the global aspect of things, yet at the same time is taking care of details. His punctuation is all there on the page.

  “He has, in handwriting terms, a good degree of tension: a good mixture of tension and release. We score on five degrees of tension and Wolfe has three, which is best for a man of action, a good equilibrium. If it was too tense it would indicate he was scared. Too relaxed is not good either. His score is the best number for someone efficient. As a general this is crucial: in organizing the whole as well as the details, he has good judgment.”

  Monsieur Choinière invited me to ask him questions I might have about Wolfe, so I said, “Would you say he has a sense of devotion? Not in a religious sense, but more in the sense of persistence or adherence to a cause?”

  Dear Jimmy, you might be interested to know that it was at this point I suddenly realized Monsieur Choinière and I were speaking about Wolfe in the present tense.

  “Yes—devotion and a sense of purpose,” he told me. “No hesitation. Firmness.”

  “I’m also wondering about the dichotomy between his ruthlessness—he’s brutal in his burning of hundreds of homesteads up and down the Saint Lawrence, and he tears the nets of poor fishing families in the Gaspé though he knows fish is their only livelihood, and there are all the people he’s slaughtered—yet he thinks of himself as principled and believes himself visionary. He envisions and hopes for a North America more enlightened than England. How has he reconciled his brutality with that vision?”

  Monsieur Choinière considered this for a moment. Then he said, “There are principles of his time that he’d adhere to. The goal is all-important. He’s not a diplomat. It’s not a question of good or evil. How did he feel? In his Quebec journal, at the ends of the lines on some days the text went in a downhill direction. Direction follows the mood of the day. The handwriting is connected, but he puts capital letters where they shouldn’t be. He has a very logical, practical mind—these people are action-oriented—but at the same time, when someone like that is stressed, the opposite emerges; the feelings, the emotions are there, though they have been contained.”

  I asked, “What about his brother Ned’s death, and the death of his lover, Eliza, and the hard time he had when he first saw the butchery of battle at Dettingen? He went into his tent for two days and couldn’t come out. He would feel emotion then the feeling would leave him and he complained to his mother that he was numb.”

  Monsieur Choinière nodded. “There are modulations: at the base of his writing there is vulnerability and emotion, but the global aspect is self-control, which is what will be seen in everyday life. But these people, if you can manage to become intimate, earn their confidence, that’s when you realize their tenderness.”

  “What about his love of poetry?”

  “He’s a man of principle, socialized as a child soldier. Poetry is a socially accepted way to channel his sensibilities. His regular way of thinking is reason. We see, underneath, intuition and feelings. It’s there. Some people are cold-blooded men of principle. We see in his handwriting that Wolfe is not cold-blooded. But he was socialized as a child soldier. Still, one thing that puzzles me,” said Monsieur Choinière, “is his relationship with money or material things. It would seem money was important for him: he could give, but he had a need for security. I see this in his letter s—he put more emphasis on the letter s, and usually s has to do with money. Psychologically he’s more anal than oral, more concerned with keeping than with giving—keeping things to himself. But then, being a man of principle, if he was to give, it would be through principle.

  “He has also got what we call foxtails in his handwriting. When he comes to the end of the page, his writing is cramped in the right margin: he doesn’t want to cut what he’s doing. He wants to do everything in the same, uninterrupted line. He has trouble cutting off or changing a course of action.

  “He knows in advance where he’s going, and he doesn’t stop. The letters are connected—they are even hyper-connected, especially in the Quebec journal. Also, we can talk about initiative. His letter t is on the ground, and the t-bar is on a 45-degree slant. We see this in people who can be impulsive, but because of the spatial organization of his writing on the page…he steps on the gas pedal, but then he brakes, using reason.

  “In other words, his first response is to be impulsive, but he has enough self-control not to do anything he would regret…unless he is tired, or very ill, or has been drinking wine.”

  After we had discussed Wolfe’s psychology, there was the matter of the Quebec journal and its authenticity. “I don’t see any intrinsic signs of forgery,” Monsieur Choinière told me. “If you try to forge, you write more slowly…like following in someone’s footsteps. There are, therefore, tremblings, or breaking-points. I look at general features and small details. There are idiosyncratic gestures that a person doesn’t even know he’s doing.”

  He would go, he said, to Ottawa and Kingston, to look at the other documents claiming to be the real thing, but he believed he would, in time, prove that the journal we had read at the McCord Museum in Montreal was the journal Wolfe wrote during the difficult days you and I know about, Jimmy—the days of doubt and mutiny, illness and loss, loneliness and dejection, and the pursuit of a vision seen by turns as heroism or despicable folly.

  We finished our Perrier and shared a pot of green tea. Monsieur Choinière had spent the whole morning in the McCord archives animating the frozen movement of Wolfe’s hand. Now he told me, “It’s like I was meeting him in person, doing an interview with him. I see him moving….His writing is slanted and angular—I see him like this….”

  And Jimmy, at this the handwriting expert rose from his seat, raised a hand holding an invisible sword, and lunged across the sushi café, his body slanted and gangling. He suddenly became the figure of Wolfe himself—awkward yet determined and elongated, although Hippolyte Choinière is in fact quite small and round
and not forceful-looking at all. It was as if his hours of studying and contemplating the handwriting of Wolfe had allowed Wolfe to briefly inhabit him.

  As soon as I gasped in recognition of the man I have studied so long, Monsieur Choinière laid down his sword and re-inhabited his own frame, and sat down again on the other side of our teapot.

  Finally, dear Jimmy, I asked Monsieur Choinière the question you have probably been wondering about: how did the handwriting of James Wolfe compare with yours, in the letter you were kind enough to let me share with him—the one about Wolfe’s lost days?

  I thought you might like to know Monsieur Choinière’s exact words, so I wrote them down in my old friend, Forkner shorthand, so as to be certain not to miss a thing.

  “Forensically speaking,” said Hippolyte Choinière, “the handwriting styles of James Wolfe and your friend, Jimmy Blanchard, are worlds apart. But from a psychological handwriting analysis point of view, the documents might have been written by the same man.”

  Dear Jimmy, I will close, and attend to my own papers. As you saw, at the Fisher Library, I am not very neat, and between my photocopied research materials and my own notes, you can hardly see from one end to the other of this little apartment, papers everywhere! I have been writing draft after draft of the story of a man called James, yet I hardly know if I will ever be able to do him justice. So I intend to press on, through the winter, hoping to have some sort of coherent manuscript in time for the new year.

  I am not sure where to send this letter. I hardly think it will last through the snow at the gazebo in the park, and you aren’t at the mission at this time of year, I know. I guess I’ll just leave it with the mission wrapped in a copy of my manuscript when I finally finish it, so that, should you choose to return, you might see what I have done with your story.

  My sincere regards,

  Jenny Waugh

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I THANK MY FAMILY, FRIENDS and colleagues, especially the following, without whose advice and support I could not have created this work: