Montreal Stories (9 page)

Amabel seemed to have forgotten her question about the officer caste. “… hissing and whispering behind us the whole time” was what she was saying now. “I could hardly hear the music.” She had a smile ready, so that if the Colonel did look at her he would realize she was pleased to be at the Bolshoi and not really complaining. “I suppose you know every note by heart, so you aren’t bothered by extra noise.” She paused, wondering if the Colonel was hard of hearing. “I hate whispering. It’s more bothersome than something loud. It’s like that hissing you get on stereo sometimes, like water running.”

“Water running?” said the Colonel, not deafly but patiently.

“I mean the people behind us.”

“A mother explaining to a child,” he said, without looking.

Amabel turned, pretending she was only lifting her long, soft hair away from her neck. She saw a little girl, wearing a white hair ribbon the size of a melon, leaning against, and somehow folded into, a seal-shaped mother. The two shared a pear, bite for bite. Everyone around them was feeding, in fact. It’s a zoo, Amabel thought. On the far side of the Colonel, two girls munched on chocolates. They unwrapped each slowly, and dropped the paper back in the box. Amabel sighed and said, “Are they happy? Cheap entertainment isn’t everything. Once you’ve seen
Swan Lake
a hundred times, what is there to do here?”

Mrs. Plummer slapped at her bangles and said, “We were told when we were in Morocco that children with filthy eye diseases and begging their food were perfectly happy.”

“Well, at least they have the sun in those places,” said Amabel. She had asked the unanswerable only because she herself was so unhappy. It was true that she had left her husband—it was not the other way around—but he had done nothing to keep her. She had imagined pouring all this out to
dead Catherine’s mother, who had always been so kind on school holidays because Amabel’s parents were divorced; who had invited her to Italy once, and another time to Morocco. Why else had Amabel come all this way at Christmastime, if not to be adopted? She had fancied herself curled at the foot of Mrs. Plummer’s bed, Mrs. Plummer with a gray braid down on one shoulder, her reading spectacles held between finger and thumb, her book—one of the thick accounts of somebody’s life at Cambridge, the reading of the elderly—slipping off the counterpane as she became more and more engrossed in Amabel’s story. She had seen Mrs. Plummer handing her a deep blue leather case stamped with dead Catherine’s initials. The lid, held back by Mrs. Plummer, was lined with sky-blue moire; the case contained Catherine’s first coral bracelet, her gold sleeper rings, her first locket, her chains and charm bracelets, a string of pearls, her childless godmother’s engagement ring.… “I have no one to leave these to, and Catherine was so fond of you,” said a fantastic Mrs. Plummer.

None of it could happen, of course: From a chance phrase Amabel learned that the Plummers had given everything belonging to Catherine to the gardener’s children of that house in Italy where Catherine caught spinal meningitis and died. Moreover, Amabel never saw so much as the wallpaper of Mrs. Plummer’s bedroom. When she hinted at her troubles, said something about a wasted life, Mrs. Plummer cut her off with, “Most lives are wasted. All are shortchanged. A few are tragic.”

The Plummers lived in a dark, drab, high-ceilinged flat. They had somehow escaped the foreigners’ compound, but their isolation was deeper, as though they were embedded in a large block of ice. Amabel had been put in a new hotel, to which the Colonel conducted her each night astonishingly early. They ate their dinner at a nursery hour, and as soon as Amabel had drunk the last of the decaffeinated coffee the
Plummers served, the Colonel guided her over the pavement to where his Rover was waiting and freezing, then drove her along streets nearly empty of traffic, but where lights signaled and were obeyed, so that it was like driving in a dream. The sidewalks were dark with crowds. She wiped the mist away from the window with her glove, and saw people dragging Christmas trees along—not for Christmas, for the New Year, Colonel Plummer told her. When he left her in the hotel lobby it was barely half past eight. She felt as if her visit were a film seen in fragments, with someone’s head moving back and forth in front of her face; or as if someone had been describing a story while a blind flapped and a window banged. In the end she would recall nothing except shabby strangers dragging fir trees through the dark.

“Are you enjoying it?” said Mrs. Plummer, snatching away from the Colonel a last-ditch possibility. He had certainly intended to ask this question next time his turn came round.

“Yes, though I’d appreciate it more if I understood,” said Amabel. “Probably.”

“Don’t you care for music?”

“I love music. Understood Russian, I meant.”

Mrs. Plummer did not understand Russian, did not need it, and did not miss it. She had not heard a thing said to her in French, or in Spanish, let alone any of the Hamitic tongues, when she and the Colonel were in Morocco; and she had not cared to learn any Italian in Italy. She went to bed early every night and read detective novels. She was in bed before nine unless an official reason kept her from going. She would not buy new clothes now; would not trouble about her hair, except for cutting it. She played bridge every afternoon for money. When she had enough, she intended to leave him. Dollars, pounds, francs, crowns, lire, deutsche marks, and guldens were rolled up in nylon stockings and held fast with elastic bands.

But of course she would never be able to leave him: She
would never have enough money, though she had been saving, and rehearsing her farewell, for years. She had memorized every word and seen each stroke of punctuation, so that when the moment arrived she would not be at a loss. The parting speech would spring from her like a separate Frances. Sentences streamed across a swept sky. They were pure, white, unblemished by love or compassion. She felt a complicity with her victim. She leaned past their guest and spoke to him and drew his attention to something by touching his hand. He immediately placed his right hand, the hand holding the program, over hers, so that the clasp, the loving conspiracy, was kept hidden.

So it appeared to Amabel—a loving conspiracy. She was embarrassed, because they were too old for this; then she was envious, then jealous. She hated them for flaunting their long understanding, making her seem discarded, left out of a universal game. No one would love her the way the Colonel loved his wife. Mrs. Plummer finished whatever trivial remark she had considered urgent and sat back, very straight, and shook down her Moroccan bangles, and touched each of her long earrings to see if it was still in place—as if the exchange of words with the Colonel had in fact been a passionate embrace.

Amabel pretended to read the program, but it was all in Russian; there wasn’t a word of translation. She wished she had never come.

The kinder half of Mrs. Plummer said aloud to her darker twin, “Oh, well, she is less trouble than that damned military-cultural mission last summer.”

Tears stood in Amabel’s eyes and she had to hold her head as stiffly as Mrs. Plummer did; otherwise the tears might have spilled on her program and thousands of people would have heard them fall. Later, the Plummers would drop her at her hotel, which could have been in Toronto, in Caracas, or in Amsterdam; where there was no one to talk to, and where
she was not loved. In her room was a tapped cream-colored telephone with framed instructions in a secret alphabet, and an oil painting of peonies concealing a microphone to which a Russian had his ear glued around the clock. There were three thousand rooms in the hotel, which meant three thousand microphones and an army of three thousand listeners. Amabel kept her coat, snow boots, and traveler’s checks on a chair drawn up to the bedside, and she slept in her bra and panties in case they came to arrest her during the night.

“My bath runs sand,” she said. Mrs. Plummer merely looked with one eye, like a canary.

“In my hotel,” said Amabel. “Sand comes out of the tap. It’s in the bathwater.”

“Speak to the manager,” said Mrs. Plummer, who would not put up with complaints from newcomers. She paused, conceding that what she had just advised was surrealistic. “I’ve found the local water clean. I drink quarts of it.”

“But to bathe in … and when I wash my stockings …”

“One thing you will never hear of is typhoid here,” said the Colonel, kindly, to prevent his wife from saying, “Don’t wash your damned stockings.” He took the girl’s program and looked at it, as if it were in some way unlike his own. He turned to the season’s events on the back page and said, “Oh, it isn’t
Lakmé
after all,” meanwhile wondering if that was what had upset her.

Amabel saw that she would never attract a man again; she would never be loved, for she had not held even the Colonel’s attention. First he sat humming the music they had just heard, then he was hypnotized by the program, then he looked straight up at the ceiling and brought his gaze down to the girls sitting next to the aisle. What was so special about them? Amabel leaned forward, as if looking for a dropped glove. She saw two heads, bare round arms, a pink slip strap dropped on the curve of a shoulder. One of the girls divided an orange, holding it out so the juice would not drip on her knees.

They all look like servants, thought the unhappy guest. I can’t help it. That’s what they look like. They dress like maids. I’m having a rotten time. She glanced at the Colonel and thought, They’re his type. But he must have been good-looking once.

The Colonel was able to learn the structure of any language, given a few pages of colloquial prose and a dictionary. His wife was deaf to strangers, and she barely noticed the people she could not understand. As a result, the Colonel had grown accustomed to being alone among hordes of ghosts. With Amabel still mewing beside him, he heard in the ghost language only he could capture, “Yes, but are you happy?”

His look went across the ceiling and came down to the girls. The one who had whispered the question was rapt; she held a section of orange suspended a few inches from her lips as she waited. But the lights dimmed. “Cht,” her friend cautioned. She gathered up the peelings on her lap in a paper bag.

Mrs. Plummer suddenly said clearly to herself or to Amabel, “My mother used to make her children sing. If you sing, you must be happy. That was another idea of happiness.”

Amabel thought, Every day of the year will be like tonight.

He doesn’t look at women now, said Mrs. Plummer silently. Doesn’t dare. Every girl is a wife screaming for justice and revenge; a mistress deserted, her life shrunk down to a postage stamp; a daughter dead.

He walked away in Italy, after a violent drinking quarrel, with Catherine there in the house. Instead of calling after him, Mrs. Plummer sat still for an hour, then remembered she had forgotten to leave some money for the postman for Easter. It was early morning; she was dressed; neither of them had been to bed. She found an envelope, the kind she used for messages to servants and the local tradesmen, and crammed a thousand-lire note inside. She was sober and cursing. She scribbled the postman’s name. Catherine, in the garden, on her knees, tore out the pansy plants she had put in the little
crevices between paving stones the day before. She looked up at her mother.

“Have you had your breakfast?” her mother said.

“It’s no use chasing
them
,” Catherine answered. “They’ve gone.”

That was how he had done it—the old shuffler: chosen the Easter holiday, when his daughter was home from school, down in Italy, to creep away. And Catherine understood, for she said “them,” though she had never known that the other person existed. Well, of course he came shuffling back, because of Catherine. All was safe: Wife was there, home safe, daughter safe, books in place, wine cellar intact, career unchipped. He came out of it scot-free, except that Catherine died. Was it accurate to say, “Serves you right”? Was it fair?

Yes! Yes! “Serves you right!”

Amabel heard, and supposed it could only have to do with the plot of the opera. She said to herself, It will soon be over.

The thing he was most afraid of now was losing his memory. Sometimes he came to breakfast wearing two kinds of shoes. He could go five times to a window to see if snow was falling and forget each time why he was standing there. He had thrown three hundred dollars in a wastepaper basket and carefully kept an elastic band. It was of extreme importance that he remember his guest’s name. The name was royal, or imperial, he seemed to recall. Straight down an imperial tree he climbed, counting off leaves: Julia, Octavia, Livia, Cleopatra—not likely—Messalina, Claudia, Domitia. Antonia? It was a name with two
a
’s but with an
m
and not an
n
.

“Marcia,” he said in the dark, half turning to her.

“It’s Amabel, actually,” she said. “I don’t even know a Marcia.” Like a child picking up a piece of glass and innocently throwing it, she said, “I don’t think Catherine knew any Marcias either.”

The woman behind them hissed for silence. Amabel
swung round, abruptly this time, and saw that the little girl had fallen asleep. Her ribbon was askew, like a frayed birthday wrapping.

The Colonel slept for a minute and dreamed that his mother was a reed, or a flower. “If only you had always been like that!” he cried, in the dream.

Amabel thought that the scene of the jewel case still might take place: A tap at the hotel-room door tomorrow morning, and there would be Mrs. Plummer, tall and stormy, in her rusty-orange ancient mink, with her square fur bonnet, first visitor of the year, starting the new cycle with a noble gesture. She undid a hastily wrapped parcel, saying, “Nothing really valuable—Catherine was too young.” But no, for everything of Catherine’s belonged to the gardener’s children in Italy now. Amabel rearranged tomorrow morning: Mrs. Plummer brought
her own case
and said, “I have no one to leave anything to except a dog hospital,” and there was Amabel, sitting up in bed, hugging her knees, loved at last, looking at emeralds.