Home Truths

by Mavis Gallant

  Only afterward did he think that he might be mistaken, but that day, the day he arrived in Berlin, he was triumphant because he sat with his back to the window and did not know or care what the weather was like outside.

  Virus X

  I

  A bunch of holly hanging upside down at the entrance to her hotel was the first thing Lottie Benz saw in all of Paris that seemed right to her. Even a word like “hotel” was subject to suspicion, since it was attached to a black façade in no way distinguished from the rest of the street. The people walking on the street did not look as if they had sisters or brothers or childhood friends, and their clothes and haircuts in no manner indicated to her a station in life. The New Look had spread from this place, but none of the women appeared to have given it a thought. As for the men, alike in their gray raincoats, only their self-absorbed but inquisitive faces kept them from seeming unemployed. Lottie, whose mother had made the dress she was wearing from a Vogue pattern, could have filled the back seat of her taxi with polka dots, the skirt was so wide. Stepping down, she shook order into the polka dots and her mother’s ankle-length Persian-lamb coat, lent for the voyage. That was when she saw the holly. Even as the taxi-driver plucked every bit of change from her outstretched hand, she turned to this one familiar thing. A city that knew about holly would know about Christmas, true winter, everything.

  That day, which was Tuesday, December 9, 1952, was laid on with a light brush. The street had been cut out of charcoal-colored paper with extremely fine scissors. Lottie had come here out of a tempest of snow. She drew a breath of air that seemed mild – her first breath of Paris. It swept into her lungs and was immediately converted into iron. She withdrew her hand, relieved of its francs, and pressed it against her chest.

  Two boys passed her, walking in step, without a glance at Lottie stranded, the taxi grinding out and away, or the bags the driver had dumped upon the curb. One boy said to the other, in an American accent, “If people depress you, why do you bother seeing them?” The iron weight shifted as she bent to pick up her suitcases. An old man in porter’s uniform watched Lottie through the frosted glass door. His eye appeared as part of the pattern of lilies etched on the glass, and then his nose. He consented to hold open the door. Lottie offered him a tip, which he pocketed. She had been advised to tip for consideration, however slight, no matter how discourteously shown. In a place where Americans were said to be hated because of the Korean War, she intended to put up a show for her own country, which was Canada. She smiled. The hotel, or France, personified by the woman at the desk with frizzy red hair, did not care. Lottie conveyed with a second smile that it was of no importance.

  For the first time in her life she was compelled to put her name to a police questionnaire. Bending over the form, she wrote “Charlotte Maria,” and wanted to put “Lottie” in brackets, but there was no room. Her home address – the Princess Pat Apartments, in Winnipeg – also seemed to want explaining. She could have written reams of explanation about everything, had there been space. She imagined a policeman reading her answers attentively. Next to “Profession” she wrote “none yet.” The woman with frizzy hair made her cross this out and write “student” in its place. Lottie gave up the questionnaire, and with it her new blue passport.

  Three messages awaited her. First, a letter from her mother, written four days before Lottie left home. Though sent with loving intention, so that Lottie would have news the instant she arrived, it contained no news. As for Kevin, he had cabled, “MISS YOU ALREADY LOVE,” a few hours after her plane took off. Supposing he discovered twenty hours later that he did not miss her at all? She examined the cable gravely. The last message was from a girl named Vera Rodna. It welcomed Lottie to Paris, and gave a telephone number. Upstairs, in her ice-cold, beige-colored hotel room, Lottie tore all three messages across, then found there was no wastebasket.

  A sunbeam revealed dust on the window and dust on the floor but, curiously, none in the air. (Perhaps in this place they deliberately allowed dust to settle. Was this better? Better for Lottie – for her asthma, her chronic bronchitis, her fragile lungs?) The bed, the cupboard containing a washbasin, the wardrobe that contained one bent wire hanger were all clean. There were no pillows, window shades, towels, or drinking glass. There were any number of mirrors, however, evenly shaded with dust, and velvet curtains that she accepted as luxurious.

  Wondering why she was noticing so much, checking herself lest she become introspective or moody, she remembered that this was the first time she had ever been anywhere alone. The notes she was taking mentally were for future letters – the first to Dr. Keller, her thesis director, the second most likely for Kevin. She unpacked her new cake of Palmolive, her toothbrush, her unworn dressing gown with rose-pink petal neckline. A hot bath, she learned, from a notice posted on the back of the door, would cost three hundred and sixty francs, which was more than a dollar. Lottie was to live on a Royal Society scholarship, supplied out of Canadian funds frozen abroad. Any baths from now on would be considered pampering. She intended to profit from this winter of opportunities, and was grateful to her country for having provided it, but in no sense did she desire to change or begin a new life.

  By Sunday the weather in the street was the weather of spring. The iron of the first breath had disintegrated, vaporized. At the bottom of her lungs was a pool of mist. She reminded herself that back home the day had not begun. The city she had left was under snow, ransacked by wind, and on the dark side of the globe. She was not homesick.

  Vera Rodna, whose message had so quickly been turned into paper scrap, came to the hotel one day when Lottie was visiting the “Mona Lisa.” She left a new letter, this time asking Lottie to come to lunch and she indicated the restaurant with a great X on a map. “Une jeune fille très élégante,” the frizzy redhead down at the desk remarked. Lottie had to smile at that. No one here could know that Vera was only a girl from Winnipeg who had flunked out of high school and, on a suspicion of pregnancy, been shipped abroad to an exile without glamour. Some of the men in her family called themselves Rodney, and at least one was in politics. End syllables had been dropped from the name in any case, to make it less specifically Ukrainian. Vera had big hands and feet, a slouching walk, a head of blond steel wool. The nose was large, the eyes green and small. She played rough basketball, but also used to be seen downtown, Sunday-dressed, wearing ankle-strap shoes. Vera had made falsies out of a bra and gym socks – there were boys could vouch for it. In cooking class it turned out that she thought creamed carrots were made with real cream. She didn’t know what white sauce was because they had never eaten it at home. That spoke volumes for the sort of home it must be.

  Lottie accepted Vera’s invitation, though there was no real reason for them to meet. Having been raised in the same city did not give them a common past. Attempting to impose a past, beginning with a meal in a restaurant, Vera would not establish herself as a friend from home, if that was what she was trying to do. But Vera, being Ukrainian, and probably no moron in spite of her scholastic and morals records, would have enough sense to know this.

  The restaurant was an Italian place on the Rue Bonaparte. Wavy, sooty dust masked the wall paintings except for a corner where someone had been at work with a sponge. There Vera waited, backed up by frothing geraniums and blue-as-laundry-bluing seas. Ashes, Sunday papers, spilled cigarettes, and bread crumbs gave her table the look of an unswept floor. Vera’s eyes tore over Lottie, head to foot, gardenia hat to plastic overshoes. She said, in a full voice that all at once became familiar and a second later had never been forgotten, “Well, this is great. Sit down.”

  “This is very nice,” said Lottie neutrally.

  “It’s not bad. I’ve tried most of them.”

  Lottie had not meant the restaurant but the occasion of their meeting. Vera began to wave at a waiter and also to talk. She sloshed wine from a bottle that was nearly empty into a glass that seemed none too clean, and pushed this at Lottie. “Some rich bastard’
s Chambertin,” she said. “Might as well lap up the dregs.”

  Lottie lifted the glass and sipped, and put it down forever, having shown she was game. She said, “How did you know I was in Paris, Vera?”

  “My mother, from my sister Frannie. Fran’s in your father’s math-and-Latin. She’s smart – makes up for me.”

  The name Frannie Rodna conveyed nothing, and Lottie accepted with some pride and some melancholy that she was now part of an older crowd.

  “By the way, what are you doing here, exactly?” Vera asked. She was dressed in a black-and-brown checked cape, and a wool hat pulled straight down to her eyebrows. She may have been quite smart by local standards, which undoubtedly she knew about by now, but Lottie could not help thinking how hunkie she looked. Vera’s crocheted gloves fell off the table. Her hands looked as if they could easily deal with the oilier parts of a motorbike. “Whadja say?” said Vera, after fishing round for her gloves.

  “I said, Vera, that my professor, Dr. Keller, is from Alsace, and that’s the reason I’m going there. My thesis is about the integration of minority groups without a loss of ethnic characteristics.”

  “Come again?” Vera’s elbows were planted in ashes and crumbs. She turned from Lottie to deal with the waiter, and ordered an unknown something on Lottie’s behalf.

  “Like at home,” Lottie said, when the waiter had left. “Vera, you do know. That’s the strength of Canada, that it hasn’t been a melting pot. Everybody knows that. The point is, I’m taking it as a good thing. Alsace is an example in an older civilization. With Dr. Keller’s contacts in Strasbourg … Vera, don’t stare just on purpose; I do find it unpleasant. I’ll give you a simple example. Take the Poles.” Delicacy with regard to Vera’s possible feelings prevented her saying Ukrainians. “The Poles paint traditional Easter eggs. Right? They stop doing it in the States after one generation, two at most. In Canada they never stop. Now do you see?”

  Vera was listening to this open-mouthed. Lottie felt she had sounded stupid, yet the idea, a favorite of Dr. Keller’s, was not stupid at all. She knew it was a theory, but she was taking it for granted that it could be applied. If it could not, let Vera prove it. Vera closed her mouth, drew her lips in between her teeth, let go her breath, and when all that was accomplished said, “You crazy or something?”

  “Think whatever you like.”

  “Do you even know what a minority is?”

  “I ought to,” said Lottie, and she took the bread and began peeling off the crust, after cracking its surface with her nails.

  “You don’t. It was always right to be what you are.”

  “Oh, was it, now?”

  An explanation for Lottie’s foolishness suddenly brightened Vera’s face. She clasped her hands, her big mechanic’s hands, and cried, “Keller’s in love with you! He’s meeting you in Alsace.”

  “He’s got a wife and everything. Children, I mean. Honestly, Vera!”

  “I think everybody’s in love,” said Vera, and indeed looked as if she thought so. “Who is it, then? Still Kevin?”

  “Yes, still.”

  “You’re going to be away, in Alsace or someplace? That’s taking a chance.” She seemed to be fumbling over something in her mind, perhaps a memory of Kevin. “I guess you needn’t worry,” she said. “You’ve kept him on the string since you were sixteen. You’ll bring it off.”

  “What do you mean, Vera, ‘bring it off’?”

  Vera looked as if Lottie should know what she meant. A platter of something strange was placed between them. Vera dug into a bone full of marrow, extricated the marrow, and spread it over a mound of rice. It might have been dog food.

  “Delicious,” said Vera with her mouth full. “Know one thing I remember, Lottie? You used to choose the meals at home, and your brothers had to eat whatever you happened to like. That’s what they told around, anyway.”

  Lottie, surprised at Vera’s knowing about this, said, “Everybody favors girls.”

  “Boy, my father didn’t,” said Vera. “He kind of respects me now, though. Your father used to scare me even more than my own. His voice was just a squeak when he got mad. You could hear every word, but the voice was up around the ceiling. When he told my father I wasn’t college material, and not even high-school material, his voice sounded artificial. You take after him a little, but your voice just gets slower and slower. Your father was a fine man, all the same. Old Captain Hook.”

  Mr. Benz had been called Captain Hook by his pupils, but there was a further matter, which Vera did not mention – Captain von Hook. That was an old wartime joke. You would have thought the mean backwash of war could never have reached them there, in the middle of another country.

  Lottie said with slow care, “How is your brother, Vera, the one who went into politics? Wasn’t there some kind of row about him? Honest Stan Rodney?”

  “Honest slob. Listen, what are you doing over Christmas? I’m going to Rome. I’ve got this friend there. He’s from home, but you don’t know him. He’s a Pole. Far as I know, he doesn’t paint any Easter eggs. I used to think he was a spy, but he turned out to be a teacher. Slav lit. When he’s working. Boy, the trouble he gets into.” Vera’s admiration for the trouble made her go limp. “Do you want to do something in Paris before I go? See a play or something? You’ve been up the Eiffel Tower, I suppose. I like going up and looking down. You see this shadow like a kind of basket, when there’s any sun. There’s Versailles and that. Euh, Fontainebleau … boring. Katherine Mansfield’s grave, how about that? Remember Miss Pink? She fed us old Mansfield till it ran out of our ears. She’s buried around Fontainebleau. Mansfield is, not Miss Pink.” Vera laughed with her mouth wide.

  “She was my favorite author until I specialized,” said Lottie primly. “Then, I’m sorry to say, I had to restrict my reading.”

  Vera dug into her rice as if looking for treasure. “Right,” she said. “We’ll go out to the grave.” Lottie consented to nothing of the kind.

  Vera must have mistaken Lottie’s silent refusal, for the next Saturday, at half past ten, she turned up while Lottie was still in bed.

  Lottie had been out with a cousin of Kevin’s, who worked at the Embassy. He had made her pay for her own drinks, as if they were still students having cafeteria coffee. Lottie was puzzled by the bar he took her to, full of youngish American men, and even more by the hateful, bitter singer at the piano. Kevin’s cousin seemed to feel that she had no right to criticize anything, having only just arrived, though he himself never stopped complaining. His landlord was swindling him; he was sick of dark rooms and gas heaters. He blamed Paris for its size. Until now he had lived in a house, never in a flat. His accent shot from one extreme of broad vowels to the opposite. He did not want to sound American but looked it. In the bar full of crew cuts, he matched any one of them except in assurance. Toward the end of the night, he began bemoaning his own Canadian problems of national identity, which Lottie thought a sign of weakness in a man. Moreover, she learned nothing new. What he was telling her was part of Dr. Keller’s course in Winnipeg Culture Patterns. She had wasted the government’s money and her own time.

  Vera said she was leaving for Rome, which she called Roma, any minute. Slumped over an ashtray on the foot of Lottie’s bed, she urged an excursion to Fontainebleau. It was a lovely sunny day – just the weather for visiting graveyards. Sleepy and pale, caught with curlers in her hair, Lottie rose and dressed, turning her back. Vera scarcely allowed her time to brush her teeth. They were doomed to catch, and they caught, the Lyon noon express. The train was filled with hommes d’affaires, who had all the seats. Lottie stood crushed against a window, looking at the backs of towns. She was cold, and speechless with hunger. After Melun she began to feel calmer, and less hungry and unwashed. Trees such as she had never seen before, and dense with ivy, met and glided apart in the winter light. Touching the window, she felt a thin cool film of sunlight. The ivy shone and suddenly darkened, as if a shutter had been swung to. Lottie forgot she had as
thma, chronic colds, low blood pressure, and that Vera would regret this.

  “I always thought I was going to die at the same age as Mansfield,” she remarked to Vera. “I may still.”

  “Not the same way.”

  “At my age, you already know what you’re going to die of.” Lottie was thirteen months older than Vera, who would be twenty-one in February. Unspecified illnesses of a bronchial nature had kept Lottie out of school for months on end. A summer grippe only last August had prevented her coming over here in September.

  “You used to wear those hand-smocked dresses,” Vera suddenly chose to recall.

  “A friend of Mother’s made them,” said Lottie, and closed a door on that with her tone of voice. Though ignominiously clothed then, she had been small for her age, and almost unnoticeable in the classes of children younger than herself. She skipped grades, catching up, passing, but no one praised her. They said Captain Hook had helped.