Montreal Stories (31 page)

I peered in over heads and shoulders. The visitors were looking hard at the television set; there were only a few around. This one was fitted into a walnut cabinet, both doors of which stood wide. Upon the glassy screen shone a square of yellow light, the reflection of the west window. I had not made up my mind about television. Lily knew that, and wondered what she should think. Was it a legitimate household object? Should it be left naked, or concealed in some other piece of furniture, brought out when there was ballet dancing to watch? As there was a ballet program on television about once a year, and a short one at that, perhaps to have a set of one’s own was a selfish extravagance—especially now, when there was so much talk about sharing.

Lily made her way back to me, stretched to her top height—in new shoes, making an allowance for rope soles, five feet three—and pointed out that these people had not only a fish-canning monopoly and a suite of rooms in a rebuilt Saracen fortress but the walnut cabinet and all it contained. A reproach? I was a graduate student living on a grant
and an allowance my Aunt Elspeth gave me. I should not have been married at all. My parents were Anglican medical missionaries in China. They were elderly and poor, had married at an age when they expected to be spared God’s gift of offspring. My mother, delivered of me (God’s last word on the subject), had gone straight back to Shanghai. The first face I remember is my aunt’s.

“This is the long gallery, where the conspirators were hanged.” Our guide spoke to no one but Lily. Her eyes were hazel with golden flecks. The sun shining in at the west window made them look transparent, pale gold. She did not ask about the conspiracy: her whole outlook was naturally conniving. Plots and quiet skirmishes had led to her present state of development. The guide continued to stare at her, helplessly, caught on the rapt, sunstruck way she looked back. The interlaced initials over the fireplace were the count’s tax collector’s, he told her. When the count confiscated the castle, out of greed and envy, he had the tax collector hanged in this room, facing north, so that his cipher, now ruined root and branch, was the last thing he saw before his blood turned dark. “As dark as the blood of a bedbug,” said the guide, as though he had been hanged and revived any number of times.

Carlotta said she could not understand one word our guide was saying. She knew French; she’d had straight A’s in French. But her French was an international, no-accent linguistic utensil. This fellow had an accent. To prove her point, she told me in no-accent French what she thought of four tapestries depicting Wisdom, Virtue, Sobriety, and King Solomon greeting the Queen of Sheba: the colors were like mud, and the whole thing needed to be dry-cleaned.

An English group now crowded into the room, jostling the French and bringing all movement to a stop. We heard, in a tinny kind of English, “The graffiti scraped into the walls are
not for the eyes of every member of the family.” Carlotta giggled and covered her mouth with both hands. “However,” the voice went on, exceedingly careful, “the curtain can be drawn aside for a small extra fee.” Through spread fingers Carlotta said to me, “That thing on the bridge? They can see it for nothing.” For some reason the French guide thought that Carlotta was laughing at him. He held himself as straight as if he were on review, and spoke coldly: “In the bedroom of the countess, draperies and bed hangings are covered with plastic. Some visitors, in the past, came here with scissors and tried to cut off pieces of silk, for souvenirs.” Carlotta thought she had been criticized, and would not look. “Scissors,” she repeated, just to herself.

Lily had been fast to see that the arms embroidered on the valance belonged to the count’s mistress. “Showing what men can get away with,” she had said. She had marched over to a portrait of the mistress as Artemis, with a breast showing, then examined the countess looking like her everyday self—crabbed, deceived, forty. There should have been a mirror so that Lily could compare her face with the faces of those other two. Instead there was a glass case holding the count’s plans for rebuilding what he was soon, recklessly, to tear down. Unfortunately, he ran out of funds—hadn’t stopped to think that only his dead collector had known how to raise money.

“Who wants to know about these people?” Lily had said. She meant that my subject, history, was just the record of simple-minded careers. Her life, necessarily remote from public interest, would nonetheless be clear, rapid, strong.

Our tickets had allowed a climb to the top of the tower. From a windblown height we looked at a new village built out of the dark stone quarried in the region. The main street was as wide as a square, to allow for tourist cars and buses.
Lily struggled to ask me something: The houses were all copies of old houses, weren’t they? Could people live good lives in a false setting?

I watched a truck carrying blocks of stone as it tried to back and turn on a dirt road. “I think most people are pleased just to have four walls and a roof.”

“I know that.”

I tried again. Did she mean that the bareness and coldness of a dead past had no power to comfort the present? This time, I had overshot. Still, I was paying attention, and she leaned against my arm, gratefully—a light, slight pressure. Then she turned and ran down the winding staircase with one motion, like a dancer.

At the bottom of the steps was a black-painted door. She waited for me to catch up before touching the handle. Behind us, a guide called that we were looking at the tomb of a local poet, not yet part of the tour. On the grave, a rose bloomed and shed. Askew on a heap of masonry—the rubble of a chapel—a sign read “Please do not stand on the main altar when taking photographs.” Roses and honeysuckle clung to the sign. Around this oasis a gardener moved, clipping box hedge. A lavender-edged walk led nowhere. A sprinkler turned lopsidedly on a blanket-size lawn.

“Do you remember ‘The Secret Garden’?” Lily said.

“My aunt tried to read it to me.”

“Could we have something like this? I don’t mean a whole castle. Just a garden.”

“It’s not for sale.”

“The whole of Europe is for sale.”

I wondered where she was getting this. Lapwing’s wife had gone sour on France. She was sick of cooking on a coal-and-wood stove and hauling ashes.

I didn’t want to own anything. It was my Aunt Elspeth who advanced the money for the house where I spent my honeymoon—the whole of my marriage, really. At first I
went on renting it for holidays. The rent gradually rose from eight to twenty-four dollars a month. The owner decided to sell because he thought our part of the coast would never be developed, and my aunt came over to see what it was worth. There was no trace of Lily by then, apart from some damp, spotted books she had drawn from English libraries and blithely inscribed with her own name. I had kept meaning to take them back, but I was not often there. As the British colonies dwindled, the libraries closed. The libraries were often run by parish committees attached to churches in the diocese of Gibraltar. For some of my neighbors, the whole of the western Mediterranean was just a bishop’s district.

Five thousand dollars: not much of a buy—a seaside wreck with a view over another damaged roof. All the same, said my aunt, her hand shading her eyes, there was the sea. “When you start to earn money, Steve, you should buy that other place and tear it down.” She wanted me to have something. If it could not be Lily, let it be a tumbledown house.

Lily never needed to own an inch of Europe. She could make it up. She began to invent her own Europe from the time she learned to read. There were no mermaids in Canadian waters; no one rode to Canterbury. She had to invent something or perish from disappointment. She imagined a place where trees were enchanted, stones turned into frogs, frogs into princes. Later, she seemed to be inventing Bach and Mozart, then a host of people who lived with Bach and Mozart easily, so that she could keep good company in her mind. Sometimes I hear a dash of Lily’s music over a radio and I wish I were still young—twenty-four would do—and could find Lily’s inventions, and watch her trying to live in them again.

I would like to provide the justice lacking in her biography. I would like to say that she married an Italian composer-conductor. A German novelist-essayist-political thinker. An Argentinian playwright-designer-poet-revolutionary: nothing harebrained—a fellow respected, consulted by chancellors
and presidents. Better still, the billionaire grandson of some Methodist grocer, generous toward the arts and all his wives. But she married me, young and broke and hardworking (Lily’s transcription: immature and tightfisted); left me for a nineteen-year-old English vagabond employed to work in the garden of an ambiguous bachelor neighbor; surfaced in Montreal as Mrs. Ken Peel; lived in a series of tidy and overheated apartments; had Carlotta and sent her to one of the Catholic schools she had once professed to despise. After the rocking-chair disaster she married Harrower, got the income, the travel, the friends in Paris and Monaco, with or without magic. (According to Carlotta, Lily’s chronicler, Harrower had been in the background for some time, “chasing after Mummy.”)

When she finally deserted me, in the southern house, the elements of my work in plastic bags to protect them from the seeping rain, I thought she might have waited, might have found the place more to her liking with the roof tiled. She had nothing against Talleyrand, even took a bus to Nice to look things up in the municipal library, so that she and I could talk as equals. Came back with the news that Talleyrand was the father of Eugène Delacroix.

I had to tell her that history is contrary in position to gossip. What offended her? That I wouldn’t play games with my work? I think it must have been then she decided I might not turn into an ambassador (she was miles ahead of me) but a teacher of history at some boggy university. She saw herself driving children to basketball practice. Saw a row of tiny shoes, cleaned with liquid whitener, on a kitchen windowsill, drying in the sun. Saw icicles dripping and snowy backyards.

I was ready for university at fifteen, won a gold medal for history two years later. My photograph was in the Montreal
Star
. When an interviewer on CJAD said I looked like F. Scott Fitzgerald, everyone my Aunt Elspeth knew tried to find Fitzgerald’s books. Most of the work was out of print, and French translations were banned in Quebec. (Not that anyone
in my aunt’s circle could have read them.) My aunt owned two novels and a collection of short stories which she would not lend: she had the habit of underlining, and she did not want outsiders to know her private thoughts and feelings. Besides, the books were hallowed now, in some way connected to my prospects.

At twenty-four, the best the prodigy had to say was that history isn’t gossip. Was that my whole mind? When Lily asked me that, I saw I had hurt her feelings. I apologized. She said, “It doesn’t matter what you’re sorry about. You’re still the same man.” I thought she was being unreasonable because she was a woman. We were sitting half turned away from each other on the stony beach. We had expected the French South to be something like Florida, but the sky was wet flannel and we wore sweaters over sweaters.

My aunt never liked my engagement to Lily: she saw Catholic entrapment, a soul floundering in the Vatican net. She still spent most of the year in Châtelroux. Some of the furniture in her house was supposed to have been brought north by ancestors who’d refused the American Revolution. Family legends had them walking all the way from Virginia, carrying chairs on their heads.

Engaged to Lily, I sat in my aunt’s green-and-white kitchen, at a table drawn up to the window. There was a crust of spring snow on the sill, melting in the sun. I had a room in Montreal, near the university. I came down on weekends whenever I could, whenever Lily was not available. She had a job in Montreal, secretary to a dentist in the Medical Arts Building. Quale relatives in one of the suburbs—Verdun, I think—kept an eye on her. She must have been twenty-two, but her family pretended she was fourteen and still a virgin.

My aunt was making pancakes. She walked back and forth between stove and table; I’d never known her as restless. She said that if I really meant to marry the Quale girl the marriage had to work. Catholics won’t divorce. (It couldn’t fail, I
knew—buttering pancakes, smiling.) Let me tell you what women won’t stand for, she said. They don’t want to be deprived of sex or money. One or the other, if it can’t be helped, but never both. Well, sometimes even both, so long as there is no public humiliation. “Such as the husband’s spending a lot of money on another woman,” she said.

She had mentioned two subjects, sex and money, that until now she had pretended did not exist. I had just been made an honorary member of a closed society—the association of women who stop talking when a man (or child) comes into the room.

About money: I had none—not yet—but Lily knew. Later, I tried to remember if I had ever neglected her or tried to make a fool of her. The public teasing to which Harry Lapwing subjected his wife disgusted me. No; what went wrong had nothing to do with either of the things my aunt had mentioned. Lily must have seen me—my mind, my life, my future, my Europe—as a swindle. She began to enjoy long conversations with Watt Chadwick’s gardener. He had thin yellow hair, was drifting, desperate, homesick. Told her he was a music student, that gardening was destroying his hands. Talked about the glories of England: he must have glossed over Oliver Cromwell. One day the two blond truants plodded up the hill to the railway station. “Leaving everything,” said Mr. Chadwick, when he came over to cry about it. (Such tears! No woman could have inspired them.) In fact, they had left nothing but two men who could not even comfort each other.

Carlotta looked with strengthened disgust at her surroundings—the flagged courtyard and rusted cannons. The tour was over. “We were ripped off,” she said. “We never got up the tower, and the German guide told his group a lot more.”

“It’s just the language,” I said. “It sounds like more.”

“I’ve never been anywhere important. I need to know the
right things.” So that was the trouble. I made her tell me some of the places she had been to—New York, Boston, Jamaica, Bermuda—and tried to explain why they mattered. Her parents had never taken her really away, she said, shaking her head. Ben and Lily went to England, or Japan, or those other, great destinations, during the school term, when there were out-of-season rates.