Lost in September

by Kathleen Winter

  “Yes, it’s famous, that quote about the snow,” said Mrs. Forest.

  “It makes my heart sink a little bit,” said Mrs. Waugh. “It makes me feel desolate…er, do you mind my asking, who is that man over in the corner?”

  “The one with the long red hair? The tall young man?”

  “Yes, him, the thin one. He seems to be studying my subject, and, to tell you the truth, I find his face remarkably…I mean if you just look at him over there and then look at these pictures, I mean this one in particular…”

  There was no mistaking it. They were talking about me.

  Mrs. Forest put her arm around Mrs. Waugh and led her just out of earshot. They turned their backs and murmured, and seemed to have forgotten that the letters, the precious letters that by rights are mine but which I cannot have, lay on the table. I stole a peep at the topmost one, dated November 13, 1756, in which I beg my mother’s forgiveness yet again…would my mother and I ever untwine? I the shoot, my mother the vine festooned with deathly trumpets?

  But my sad reverie was cut short; Mrs. Waugh was coming back.

  If only I was allowed to touch my letters as she could touch them! I longed to finger them once more: my High Street paper fragile, woven and folded, stained pink by my seal and blotched with my notorious ink-spills. Transparent with time, rain, and oil from my own fingers and my mother’s—how often Mama folded and unfolded, read and reread each letter of mine, searching for the wound I in fact revealed to her over and over again, the truth she couldn’t grasp.

  Mothers!

  Now my letters sat on their bindings in crazed time-worn layers, 232 of them, enfolding my brother’s death, my lost innocence, my picking of those wild, sweet Canadian strawberries so tiny and juicy, my love of dogs, the deep unease with my mother, the arms of my lifelong dearest George, my forlorn ethereal Eliza, yet more anguish with my mother, and my everlasting question of how not to lose my humanity in the ecstasy of war.

  Sophie Cotterill knows nothing of these words. But Mrs. Waugh, in the year since I met her at the Fisher, has been devouring them.

  Will she find the one thing hidden inside them that I wish the world to understand? Dear Mrs. Waugh, can I trust you to locate it, recognize its importance, and explain it to Tante Claudette?

  The injustice of it has, if Tante Claudette wants to know the truth, been driving me mad.

  Sophie doesn’t listen to what I say. My mother failed to listen, my father couldn’t listen, my military superiors had no idea what listening was, or if they did, they didn’t care. They did not hear, none of them heard my plea, my cry, my heartfelt question.

  Eleven, eleven, eleven. When, for pity’s sake, might I have my eleven stolen days returned to me?

  What I would have done with those days. Were they truly too much for a soldier to ask?

  Had they not been pilfered, the course of my life, and of history, might have…well, for a start, dear Tante Claudette, you’d be très contente, for the whole of Canada would have remained French.

  Every river and its tributary, every mountain and hill. Every street in every town and city.

  French.

  Ah, my beautiful, beloved, lost French world! Can you perceive it, Mrs. Waugh, as you study my letters? Is it plain enough or have you only a glimpse? Wait till we meet again, soon, I hope—I’ll tell you about Hotteterre, about La Pompadour, about Montparnasse in the rain studded with umbrellas, those graceful apparatuses Parisians knew long before doddering Londoners….

  —

  BUT DO I YET TRAIPSE the Gaspé? Look at its birches now, reminding me of loneliness, of being lost, of my eternal homelessness.

  Partridge, ptarmigan, trout.

  Homespun wool, barley.

  Potatoes, rhubarb, herring.

  Melancholy, eternally mine.

  How Mrs. Waugh perked me up last September. Near closing time at the library that day, she went to the washroom and I sidled over for a look at what she was up to. Her notes were a mess. They were not official-looking. In fact, they were covered with drawings and marked to near indecipherability by arrows and asterisks and rough pencil sketches of other library patrons, including a surprising likeness of myself. I had not been in the slightest aware that Mrs. Waugh had been sketching me.

  Was it her sympathetic rendering of my face that made me do the thing I did next?

  I think so. It was easy to swipe one of her expired requisition slips and make another in her name, ease it into the pending requests box on the counter, and wait to see what she would do when they gave her my most precious possession. It too had been stolen from me, like my eleven days. And now it was entirely forbidden for me to touch it, though it belongs to me, a gift from the only one who loved me: red, pulsing, alive, an animal locked up in the hall of memory and longing.

  I went out for a drink at the fountain on the second floor where the water is lovely and cold. When I returned Mrs. Waugh was still at the toilet so I checked to see whether my possession had been delivered to her—but it was still in transit. I noticed that amongst her notes lay a copy of a letter she had written to some handwriting expert in Montreal. It read thus:

  Dear Monsieur Choiniére,

  I am a Montreal author, currently writing a book about a real person who is no longer alive, but whose handwriting and documents are available to me. I am seeking a psychological handwriting analysis based on a sample of the person’s handwriting. I can provide only an electronic or printed duplicate, as the original documents are in the care of archival custodians and cannot be taken from their storage. I understand it is likely that you normally work only from originals, but it would be of great service to my book project if you might consider doing the best you can with the facsimile I could send or bring to you. If you might be able to do this, please let me know your timeline and fees. Thank you for considering this,

  Sincerely,

  Genevieve Waugh

  A psychological handwriting analysis! Dear god, what kind of person was this Mrs. Waugh? I decided I would have a little talk with her. Maybe I’d wait for her on the steps outside, later on.

  Then came the clerk with the surprise object. To her credit, Mrs. Waugh did not let on that she had not requisitioned it. And the box is so exquisite, if Tante Claudette herself were presented with it she would, I am sure, not do a single thing to betray the fact that she had not asked for it. She would, like Mrs. Waugh, let it arrive.

  “His poem,” said the clerk, “is in a box within a box within this box.” She lifted the first lid and took out a layer of card, then lifted the second box out and laid it in the sparkling cradle. “You can take it from here.”

  “Thank you,” said Mrs. Waugh, as if all were normal.

  The inner box is oxblood red. It has a fragrance: fruity, like dried figs. It looks but does not smell like leather. Inside lies my very own copy of Thomas Gray’s famous poem, “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.” My book is chocolate-coloured and also chocolate-scented: pure chocolate from cocoa without sweetness. From three desks away I smelled the fig and chocolate, felt the plumes rise and disperse in that vaulted pentagonal room with its five floors of rare manuscripts and tomes rising up so very far above us to the distant ceiling. But not without curling first around Mrs. Waugh’s torso and hair.

  Mrs. Waugh gasped.

  We both understood that an animal had had its enclosure opened and we were able to smell its body. Together we inhaled my old, familiar vapours.

  Ha! Gotcha, Mrs. Waugh. The vapours have got us both.

  I waited outside on the steps for Mrs. Waugh to come out. I gobbled half a cheese sandwich tossed in a bin by some member of the university’s extravagant student body, that crowd sprawled down the edges of the stairs—none of them anywhere near as serious as I’d expect: civilian life becomes progressively harder for me to comprehend. Mrs. Waugh slowed when she saw me. I nodded. She came closer, looked me in the eye.

  “You do look like him. Like Wolfe.”

  “I shou
ld say.”

  “Heather Forest explained to me that you—”

  “Would you like an interview?”

  “I—”

  “If you wanted to bring me to your house, I could explain things that aren’t in my letters: missing pieces, gaps, in-between things I wish people understood—you are writing a book about me, are you not?”

  “I’m trying my hand at a book based on the letters of—on Wolfe’s—I’m a journalist, or have been one, not so much anymore, but—these days I’m, to tell you the truth—it began as a rather personal inquiry. I’ve studied letters for years, finding connections between mothers and sons—or daughters—who try to understand each other across time and distance but who can never seem to…and, when I found this collection of Wolfe’s letters to his mother, in which at times he seems so lost…”

  “Indeed.”

  Right then and there, on those steps, I tried to explain to Mrs. Waugh about my lost eleven days. “Not just any days,” I told her, “they were days I had been granted leave to go to Paris, after many years of asking. They were to have been my dancing days, my hour of learning, my time of freedom from a decade of combat. A golden segment of my youth, stolen as I was about to dance the sarabande in Paris…”

  Mrs. Waugh regarded me carefully but declined my offer to accompany her home and fully explain. She lived, she told me, not in Toronto, but in a tiny apartment across from Saint Louis Chapel on Montreal’s Rue Drolet.

  “My apartment is very small,” she began, “unsuitable, really—”

  “But I visit Montreal every September,” I told her. “We could convene at your kitchen table while I tell you about myself and my mother—”

  “I don’t actually have a kitchen table,” she said, “and I—well, I’m embarrassed to say I have a small problem with mice, little black mice who come in from the garden next door once September comes—right after the first one or two cool nights…”

  “I do not mind mice!”

  “Well, I mind them.” Mrs. Waugh grasped for a firm reply. I saw she was one of those people who startle at intimacy of any kind. I had an impression she might rather be alone with her mice than have large humans intrude upon her. She wished to examine my letters in the safe cloister of a library, not necessarily to befriend their author. I understood this, and decided to give her a piece of encouragement.

  “Here,” I took a precious envelope from my pocket, “is a letter you won’t find in the Fisher Library.”

  That fixed her. She read it, then handed it back to me quite shaken. “How did you get this? It’s—” She glanced back at the library doors.

  “Don’t worry, I didn’t steal it from there.”

  “But it’s a—it looks like an original document…”

  “Yes, my mother wrote to the prime minister—”

  “…written by Wolfe’s mother, Henrietta—look, you can’t just walk around with—”

  “My mother! Yes—She wrote this one begging, beseeching, demanding the pension due to her upon my death—look, you can see how angry she was, the injustice of what a government will try to do to cheat a fallen soldier’s family—” I held the letter aloft and read my mother’s indignation aloud:

  Am I to sue on bended knees for what should be given…and would have been had He survived the Campaign which covered England with Glory….

  Distressed, Mrs. Waugh actually touched my arm. “Look, you have to give the letter back—Heather Forest will be…”

  “It isn’t Heather Forest’s letter,” I said, spiriting it back into my pocket, where I hold it as one of my most important papers, a testament to everything I am and stand for. “It’s my own. It was my mother’s—Henrietta Wolfe’s—and now it’s mine. And I have a lot more to say about what led up to her writing it than you’ll find in the archives. But perhaps you aren’t interested in words from the horse’s mouth. Perhaps…” I fixed her with what I believed to be my coolest, most dispassionate expression and, while doing so, backed away from Mrs. Waugh slightly, as if to announce a final parting.

  “Wait,” she reconsidered. “Perhaps…well, it could be that I should…” She looked at my hair, my face. “Certainly not at my apartment, but…if there was a neutral place, some café perhaps, or—if by the post we could arrange something, once we are back in Montreal—but you say you only visit there?”

  “Next September,” I told her, “starting on the third for eleven days, you can leave me a message at the Old Brewery Mission on Clark Street.”

  I did not tell Mrs. Waugh about my tent with Sophie Cotterill in Parc du Mont-Royal. Nor did I mention that the ideal place to leave me a note was to tuck it in a crack of the Mordecai Richler Gazebo in the park just below our tent, between the gazebo’s railings and its north pillar facing the park’s angel. I could tell her this later, should she choose to contact me. As it was, she gave me a postbox number belonging to one of the little rentable mailbox centres offered by all the Jean Coutu drugstores. Box 444.

  2 His Flute

  SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 3.

  NIGHT.

  Montreal, Quebec

  AS I APPROACH, I SEE Soph’s silhouette inside the tent. I smell her bean tin brimming with scalding hot Labrador tea.

  Everything in the tent is a bit damp: the sleeping bags, the tent walls. Sophie has a cozy little corner set up where, for our time together, she’ll commune with her emails between checking Facebook and insulting me. I hope my letter-writing notepad isn’t damp. She notices my hand sneak to it.

  “Writing to your mama already? You haven’t even said hello.”

  “Maybe.” This is a lie. I need, in fact, to get a note to Mrs. Waugh to inform her that I’m here. “Did you get the honey for my tea?”

  “Here, pass me your quill and parchment. I’ll write that mother of yours a few home truths.” She grabs my pen.

  “Dearest Madam Wolfe,” she announces. “Sweet Henrietta: Your son, Bigbad, is an unbelievable procrastinator, a real fusspot…”

  “I’m not. I’m timely. I don’t vacillate and I’m not fussy. Ask anyone.”

  “He claims he isn’t particular, but tomorrow he’s going to send me all over the Plateau looking for honey that simply must…Where the hell is your honey supposed to come from?”

  “I need Minorcan honey.”

  “He says he doesn’t vacillate but he swans in and out of Payons Comptant pawnshop gawking at the poor old flute he claims once belonged to him…”

  “My flute saved me, you know that. Playing my flute protected me from untold horrors.”

  Sophie can turn self-righteous and often claims to possess all sorts of attributes far more interesting than I’ve been able to discern. I mean, when I met her—eleven Septembers ago to this day—what was she doing? Plunging wieners in the deep fryer in Germain Medosset’s wagon on the crescent beach, just below Madame Blanchard’s house, where I first emerged from my hibernation, shivering and uncertain as to where to turn. She didn’t even sell cod or real chips, only corn dogs and prepackaged nuggets and onion rings, and flat Coke. “I’m not interested in having sex with a crazy soldier,” she said as I ordered a second cone of previously frozen fries. I had not solicited her at all! She passed me her business card:

  SOPHIE COTTERILL

  Short Order Cook

  Janitorial and Maintenance Services

  Wet Nurse

  Hypnosis, Talk Therapy, Shamanic Tent

  “I thought a wet nurse had to be— Aren’t you—”

  “Aren’t I what?”

  “Pardon me.”

  “What.”

  “Nothing.”

  “Too old?”

  “I wasn’t—” But I was. She had to be nearly fifty.

  “That’s how much you know, buddy. Have you never heard of Judy Waterford? I thought you said you were British. I’ve kept my milk going twenty-seven years. I hear from my other soldiers who miss their mommas that it does the trick. Check out my reviews on wetnurse.com.”

  It was a w
hile before I entrusted Sophie with my September nights.

  I hung out by the snack van for a couple of days and discovered she loved a midnight bacon sandwich as much as I did. We ate these on the stones while I talked and she repaired her tent, which she was planning to set up in Montreal once Germain Medosset, her cousin, came back from hospital. “He had nobody else down here,” she told me. She’d come from the Magdalen Islands to give him a hand. “Don’t get the idea I’m a pushover though,” she warned me. “I have my own reasons for getting off the islands and working through the winters in Montreal. What about you? How come you’re stuck here in the land of cod and fog, a young man like you in that big old wreck of a house up the hill?”

  That’s when I started telling Sophie Cotterill about my past. I told her about Cartagena then Dettingen, about losing my brother, Ned, at Ghent, and nearly losing my mind on Flemish battlefields.

  “A child soldier,” Sophie said, nodding.

  I divulged the horrors of Culloden, then the broken promise of my longed-for leave in Paris, where I’d thought I might become free—and I told her about my eleven stolen days. How, on September 2, 1752, England fell for Europe’s shiny new Gregorian calendar, and how every man, woman and child among us found September second followed by the fourteenth, missing out the days between. Portentous interval! The new calendar not only stole my dancing lessons in Paris and all manner of joy, it darkened the very date—September 13—of my death, seven years later, on Abraham’s plains. I swear I felt a shadow.

  “As it happens, today’s the anniversary,” I told her. “September second, the day I lost everything.”

  By the time I finished telling her my story I broke down on the pebbles near that barachois where I’d mouldered, since Madame Blanchard’s forlorn departure earlier that summer, without a soul to listen or offer consolation.

  “Jesus,” said Sophie, “If anyone needs my services it’s you. You need to come back to the present, my friend, or you’re gonna fade to nothing here, like that starfish in the dried-out rockpool behind you.”