I don’t tell my mother that I reimburse Sophie for her services.
Nor do I mention that Ruelle des Fortifications is featureless, not a proper military passage with breastwork or alternating staircases or even the remains of a watchtower. It is covered by glass and by protruding storeys of overhanging offices and hotels. I can hardly see the sky. It, like many historic military sites I have revisited, now has a disappointing, civilian meaninglessness. Its old fort walls have tumbled or been dismantled and now it is merely a corridor. People with suitcases on wheels find themselves in it en route from their hotel lobbies to the subway station.
Nor is it entirely true that Sophie and I are not physical. I adore resting my head in her lap in the tent when she’s not on night shift at the Mission. I love her holding my hand as we watch leaf shadows on our lamplit canvas and listen for the park watchman, who found us once. I do not mention to Henrietta that Sophie is in her fifties. She might be sixty by now for all I know. But over the years I have, like many sons, learned to tell my mother what she wants to hear.
Once I complete my inspection of the fortifications, I intend to walk on the old Iroquois road, to an area just up from the port where you’ll be amused and perhaps happy to know they have named a modest but dignified street after
Your devoted, loving and obedient Son…
I despise Wolfe Avenue.
If my mother ever saw it she’d lose her mind.
The street is no more than a block and a half long and contains no landmark, no building of commerce or industry, no church and not even a scrap of shrubbery for beauty. It is a street with shuttered doors and heavy red brick over narrow, frowning windows, and it holds a terrible and undefined sadness, especially when in shadow, as it remains for all but a half hour each day. I would rather not have a street named after me at all than see this tiny avenue with my name on the sign at the end, obviously erected with supreme reluctance by the city fathers: an afterthought. There is no joy in it for anyone. My only solace is that next door to it lies a street exactly the same named after Montcalm—not that I wish such melancholic remembrance for him either.
How strange that Montcalm and I lie side by side, in cement and treeless brick, in shadow: each of us dreaming of loves we lost while fighting one another on the desolate plains. Montcalm, I know, dreams of his beloved daughter Mirète. And I am myself tormented over losing Ned, and George, and Eliza, though Sophie claims I did not love Eliza Lawson at all. She claims that with Eliza I had something else going on: yet another reason I must come back each autumn to the land of the living to try and redress what was left unfinished.
I did not save all my mother’s letters. I know sons do—they collect them in a drawer to revisit once she has passed on, hoping her letters might, over time, release some yet-unfathomed importance. I never felt that way about my own mother’s letters. The only one I keep, the one I showed to Mrs. Waugh and guard in my pocket, is the one beseeching the prime minister to release my pension.
I’ve recited others to Sophie in our tent at night, despite how impatient she grows.
“Where are the originals?” she demands. I have to explain to her again and again that my mother’s letters to me have become caught between the years and I’m unsure whether some library keeps them, or I left them in my desk at Westerham in Kent, or if, in fact, they might be in the upstairs room where Madame Blanchard safeguarded some of my belongings in her little saltbox on the Gaspé.
“The one I need to examine,” Sophie says, “is the one about your bloody pension.”
“I thought I showed you that one already.”
“No, you keep promising me you will but so far all I get is wild stories in the night.”
Despite Sophie’s attempts to assist me over the last ten years, I torture my soul bringing to mind Henrietta Wolfe’s letters. The more I ruminate over them the more terribly their every word inhabits me. Did I imagine time might render them neutral?
Dear James,
I’m in my garden…
My mother often wrote to me from her garden, as if her phlox and sweet peas and Canterbury bells and all her other garden entities were accomplices without whose assistance she dared not compose. At times on the battlefield I craved a special trip to that garden so I might tear her bleeding hearts and columbines out by their roots.
There is a little chaffinch mother laying spider-silk in my pear bush, and her eggs are the loveliest green except for one that glows red with a maroon splotch that strikes me for all the world as the shape of the birth-mark on the small of your back…
This reference to an intimate part of my body that only a mother or a lover would know disturbs Sophie. I have not told her how once, when my mother and I still lived together, Mama touched a tender, hind-part of my neck and announced I had a mole growing there, with a coarse hair coming from it, that had not been there before, as if I’d arranged to have it appear on purpose to confound her. My mother’s fingers burned me and I flinched, as I flinched from all her attentions.
Her attempt to discourage my affection for my intended, Eliza Lawson, began with a single letter that I now think my mother believed would suffice to end the liaison, though I did not realize her intent at the time:
Miss Lawson showed up at Mr. Keith’s in her grey gown held over from last year but with new ruffles at the neck. The sons of various families asked her to dance and she appeared eager to comply with every request, so for most of the night I had a hard time watching her at all, so many corners and partitions did she flit behind, for minutes at a time, no doubt entranced by the company she kept.
I knew Eliza loved dancing and hadn’t the money to have a gown made every year—her unconcern over such vanities was one of the things I admired about her—so my mother’s insinuation took no foothold in me then.
But later, when my mother started sending me letters infected with loneliness, that first one came back to mind with its frantic edge highlighted, and I was surprised to have missed it before. Then came this:
My beloved,
Sadness looms like Blackheath’s thunderclouds—suspended unmoving, bright silver-white—it chokes the day. Melancholy is heavier than any cloud. Though to weigh it on Dr. Morrison’s scale wouldn’t move the gauge.
Does my loneliness have a colour? Red? No. An absence of red: your red hair, your red coat, your blood once part of mine.
Does loneliness weigh anything? It has the weight of a little white mouse scampering over my mattress in the night—a dream mouse that tells me at midnight how many miles you have gone from me. The mouse weighs less than a slice of bread but if he scampers on my heart he crushes it. I wake unable to breathe.
What sound has my loneliness?
It’s the long thin needle a curlew flings, that sharp note hidden mid-song. You kill me with that secret needle, suggesting you’ll marry the Lawson woman. What became of your way of leaning your neck on mine when you loved me here in the house?
My mother wrote these things as if I was responsible for our intimacy, if that’s what it was. Perhaps Sophie is right to criticize. Should my mother not have had more restraint?
When I was with my regiment in Scotland and my father travelled away from home more and more often, supposedly for his work as inspector of Marines, my mother wrote me nearly every day.
My dearest son,
Did you know before you were born I had to lie with my eyes shut for an hour every morning, persuading myself it was all right to be alive? I don’t mean I was slightly sad. I mean that waking alone, with you not born, I had a stone on my chest that would drown any other woman if she held on to it at our summer bathing spot.
The stone bore spores from deep underground, that coldest place where memory fails and the future fails and so does any present joy.
Who embraced your mother then? But when you were born, that first time I saw you, I found the warmth others somehow gain from the sun or friends or hearths and pots of supper and candle flames and all the lanterns of or
dinary life, lanterns whose light has never touched me.
I counted on you too much to provide me with some little comfort. You didn’t know it for awhile, a very little while. But then you did know it. Everyone around me comes to know it, and considers me, in the end, a drain-hole, a cave into which they can pour any amount of care only to have it twist into ice. I live in a malevolent chill and can’t be saved.
I think now that my mother blamed my father for claiming me, even before my birth, for a military life. She said he and his beloved army were like creditors in a magic tale, in which the first-born child is the debt payable upon its coming-of-age.
I remember her entreating me to lie snug against her in her bed where we slept entwined through my youth until well after I was twelve. I remember my mother’s scent, her silk night-dress cool in summer against my skin. My friend George Warde’s mother did not ask him to sleep with her like that. I know this because one hot day as we took shade in his own little room, I said how nice it was that he had a room to himself.
“Do you not?” he asked me. I told him I slept with my mother in her bedroom, and he said, “In her bed?” and looked so surprised that I answered of course I had my own bed, though I did not.
Now I think what my mother feared most was not distance between us, nor did she fear time—but she dreaded the day I found my own purpose. The thing she resented, and of which she was most jealous, besides Eliza Lawson, was my warrior’s sense of purpose and the value—meagre though I know it to be—that king and country assign to an army man. I believe she thought that as long as she kept me close I would be purposeless, as she was:
My dear James,
I lash sweet peas to their trellis…the dogs have all got catarrhal fever and Ball has had to be put down, while my evenings are devoted to feeding Caesar and Romp with spoonfuls of milk and cod liver oil…
I know you won’t understand this, but I sit at the open window all day, as long as the rain falls, looking at my drenched currant bushes. The rain does all the cultivating work, quenching leaf and stem and giving ant and robin a little drink at the same time. The rain (and not myself) brings life to the garden and to the countryside beyond. As long as it falls, no one will discern my uselessness. If only it could keep on raining.
But it won’t. I dread being exposed, a dried-up husk of an insect, fit only to be blown into the street by the first warm wind.
Help me, son…
What son can fulfill such a claim on him? How can he answer it except by crossing an ocean as soon as he possibly can? What can he do with a letter like this:
When you were born, I imagined you belonged to my world. But this is an illusion to placate mothers. Motherhood is a temporary blossoming. Then we contract again. When you departed my life turned back into a hard little seed, not living this time but dead: the caraway in a cake to be spat out, unpalatable.
I might have escaped being discarded if I’d only continued contracting, into a smallness more infinitesimal than any seed—a point that intersects with pure zero and then continues into a different world. A world where mothers have no fear of being seed-small: they’ve moved beyond the smallest, most inconsequential nonexistence and have entered a space a man can’t know.
“You understand,” I told Sophie last September during one of these recitations, “my mother kept writing to me after she knew I was gone. She wrote two letters before word could reach her across the ocean—that happens to military families all the time. But this one I’m telling you about now….It was dated December 13, 1759, exactly three months after my death:
My Dearest,
I’ve had the mantua-girl on St. James Street make me a little visard to shade my eyes so I don’t have to suffer anyone noticing their puffiness. It’s embarrassing to cry in the park or in the shops and I never know when I’m going to do it. A fan is not concealing enough. The new visard allows me to walk outside without worrying over others’ pity.
This is worse than when you stopped holding my hand, all grown up, while mothers with smaller boys felt rapture as their sons clung with fond grabs, kisses and petulant complaints.
I wasn’t finished with you. You still live in my second, phantom memory, one in which you and I are younger, or sometimes older, than we are at this moment. I see you helping me choose the leather for the new shoes I’ll wear at your wedding, though I can’t envision the bride.
Your father never cared about buttery leather the colour of a cream-brown rosebud. You remember the shoe, don’t you, though we have not yet gone to choose it, and now we never will choose it outside our secret world. Your father and I never shared such a world.
You promised me you’d quit the army after Quebec. When your father died just after you sailed, I leapt, thrilled: his and the army’s claws would have to release you. Why did you not come back?
Remember walking past Mrs. Torrence’s garden twice one morning on purpose, to see her fat lilies ache open by noon? Or us, slow as caterpillars past Drake’s on the corner to watch the old baker roll knotted buns in time for our tea?
All the flickering green light your father never noticed or cared about, all the shadows in the leaves—we cared about them, didn’t we. I wonder if you care about them now?
“You and your nonsense,” Sophie said. “Always going on about trees, and little old men, and things you spy on the street.” She crammed into her mouth popcorn she’d scooped for free out of a machine at Jumbo Video—she’s always storing free food to eat at night in the tent. “And tell me, where am I supposed to believe you found that letter, since you had died by the time she wrote it?”
“I can’t remember—why?”
“I suspected you might be a bit vague about it.”
“What does it matter? She wrote it to me and I remember it.”
“If, as you say, Henrietta wrote it to you after your death in 1759, obviously you’d not have received it posthumously.”
“It must have lain among the papers I retrieved out of our house at Westerham when I went back to England, two years ago, to endure the mock musketry among the watermelons, the so-called reenactment of my glorious battles….”
“So you stole it.”
“I don’t see how it can be called stealing—anyone could see the letter was plainly addressed to me.”
“What about that pension letter to the prime minister, hmm? Why won’t you hand it over?”
“Is my pension really all you care about?”
“You should care about it too, Jimmy Bee. Money is power and we had an agreement.”
4 Lonely Calèche
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 4.
AFTERNOON.
Place d’Armes. Montreal, Quebec
I STILL HAVEN’T COMPLETED MY mission and found a baguette—even though Sophie did remind me bread is to be found in the city’s second circle of roads, not the first.
The first circle is what she calls this old Iroquois road along the Saint Lawrence River up as far as the cobblestones around Place d’Armes. They aren’t, strictly speaking, cobblestones at all, since they haven’t come from a beach. But I’d best keep this knowledge to myself, as Soph becomes offended when I correct her.
Looking at our shopping list lifts my vapours slightly. I used to love going to Blackheath Market with a shopping list of my mother’s: currant jelly, eggs, bacon. Shopping was always a cheerful prospect after military camp and it still gives me solace here amid the rain and stones of Place d’Armes, where statues preside arrogantly over the square and a lonely calèche horse awaits a customer, nostrils aquiver at the sugar-scent from the pile of wet carrots on his red seat.
I’ve no umbrella, dammit. I tried to add one to our list but Sophie mocked the notion—an opinion my mother shared. So now my collar wilts in this dreary square and I can’t free my heart from the oppression of these statues with their pompous inscriptions.
Every September I come to Place d’Armes to try to understand what has become of my legacy, but am instead compelled to read a pla
que extolling the heroism of Paul de Chomedey for slaughtering an Iroquois chief, on this spot, a hundred years before I lost Ned, and a hundred and twenty before I scaled L’Anse au Foulon. You’d think de Chomedey overcame the chief with his knuckles instead of firing his snazzy pistols. And you’d have no way of knowing I ever set foot in Quebec.
Plenty in the square extols how the French wrested Montreal from the Iroquois—bronze nuns tame savage children—is that Jeanne Mance bandaging the finger of a Mohawk child with a scrap of plaster from the chemist? Sergeant-major Lambert Closse crouches behind me, his dog and gun staring down a bronze Iroquois warrior, the most splendid of the bunch. There’s no English face among the statues unless you count the gargoyle masks wreathed in fresh-harvested grain, sticking out their grotesque tongues in a bloodcurdling cry of…victory? I fancy not.
Where’ve I seen these masks before?
They aren’t English, exactly, not in the way I am English—I suspect they’ve been added to the monument to frighten any English away.
Sophie would tell me to stop taking things so personally. “Loosen up. Go buy yourself a beer. But not in the first circle. You’ll have to catch a bus. Do I have to repeat everything?”
I recall perfectly well her explanation of Montreal’s circles. It happened the first year we met, when I went to the Mission to get rigged out with a few clothes. She found me a passable pair of boots in the basement, as not many men can use a size thirteen. From the donations pile she nabbed me a couple of shirts with sleeves nearly long enough, but hats were a different story. No one cared about hats any more. I’d tried proper hats on in the shop called Henri Henri only to find that a single one cost a month’s worth of my former pay.
Lost in September Page 4
