Devotion

by Howard Norman

  Then they sat down and discussed salary and other details, and at the end of this, Isador said, “We feel comfortable having you take care of this property, and we hope you’ll accept. We intend to visit at least once a year, no doubt in summer, if we have the choice.”

  Janice said, “And we’d like to visit Scotland once a year as well.”

  “Two weeks vacation all right?” Isador said.

  “Fine,” William said.

  “We have no papers for you to sign,” Isador said.

  “None needed,” William said.

  Isador went into the kitchen, brought out a bottle of champagne, said, “It’s too early in the day for this, but let’s make that the reason, along with our new arrangement.” They each had two glasses of champagne. They talked a while longer, confident that things would work out. Then each couple, old and young, went to their bedrooms and took naps.

  Stefania and Isador stayed on another month, then traveled to Islay. “Off to the next adventure, all of us,” Janice said at the airport. “Bless your hearts.”

  Janice set up a bookbinding studio in Parrsboro, in back of a building next door to the bakery. Janice and Dory Elliot became fast friends. In fact, it was Dory’s advice that Janice send notices to every church in the entire province of Nova Scotia, announcing that she “specialized” in the repair of family Bibles. Packages soon began to arrive. And for the next few years the mending of Bibles made for Janice’s mainstay income.

  His insurance had allowed William a private nurse up until March 1986, but then David took over those duties. He was not a poor cook, though not really inventive, which, given William’s limited diet, did not much matter. He prepared and carried in breakfast, lunch and dinner on a tray. The bathroom was only a few steps from William’s bed. By April William was able to slowly get into and out of bed on his own. And he had begun to take a morning constitutional to the mailbox at the end of the long, winding dirt driveway, though on William’s first attempt David had found him disoriented, winded, leaning against the mailbox post, and had to assist him into the pickup truck and deliver him back to the house. Late afternoons, William might shuffle to the kitchen and make a hot cocoa. This kept his circulation going, muscles from atrophying and so on. Doctor’s orders. Sometimes while watching television he stood next to the bed and walked in place. All of this was the studied pace of recovery, of getting back, as William put it, to fighting shape.

  Still, William indeed spent much time in bed, watching movies on television, listening to opera—there was a Grundig-Majestic turntable in his bedroom too—the radio in general. William’s pelvis had needed a second surgery, which he received in Halifax in mid-June. “This set me back,” he told Maggie when she visited him in the hospital. “But it had to be done.”

  “You’re a tough old coot. Things are working out, Pop.”

  His voice therapist, Dr. Marian Epson, drove from Halifax to work with him, a ninety-minute session each Monday and Friday beginning at 10 A.M. William was pleased to note she was no nonsense. In early July she had reported to William that he was “making absolutely wonderful progress. A voice more or less earns its way back through such broken architecture of the larynx. It takes very devoted labor, and some people just aren’t up to it.”

  William thought that Dr. Epson had a way with words. He got on with her. And it was true that for him it had all been excruciating; yet each bit of progress, from a sort of whispered gargle to a few whole sentences, had been exhilarating. He had met his goal of being able, by March, to read aloud to himself from a book, twenty pages at a sitting. For this he went back to Robert Louis Stevenson. “I know they’re considered mostly young people’s books,” he said to Maggie, “but their stories keep up with me. Stevenson’s a fellow countryman. I like our reunions every few years.”

  William often wrote out messages rather than speak them. Those to Maggie were fatherly. Designed to exhibit humor, to let Maggie know his spirits were lifted by her presence. During his speech exercises, he’d come to understand something about the sheer physical quality of words, borne up by the industry of the voice box. Words seem to weigh less of late was a note he had written to Maggie.

  The communications with David were quite different. On any given day they might be cordial: We’ve been thrown into a strange situation here, haven’t we? Far more often, however, they had a sentiment and forecast similar to the one he’d handed to David on May 28 (David dated and filed them): Out to the mailbox and back is seldom a problem now. Not too long, I’ll be able to knock your lights out. Looking forward to the day.

  Love at First Sight

  MAGGIE AND DAVID first met on April 13, 1985, in London. She was thirty, he was thirty-two. He was living in a tidy three-room flat on George Street, two blocks from Durrants Hotel, in the opposite direction from the café near where the accident took place. Yet he was often in Prague taking photographs.

  At one point David had hoped to have an exhibition of his own photographs. He was part of a small group who met every Wednesday night at this or that restaurant or café, a loose-knit affiliation of photographic strivers, some very talented, all serious about the art, all quite professionally anonymous. Hoping for representation, David made the rounds of galleries, with no luck. Also, he had thought to publish a book of his photographs. No luck with publishers, either. His mentor was the Czech genius Josef Sudek. Having carried out five years of dedicated research, visited Prague dozens of times, he was something of a scholar of Sudek’s life in Prague. He had visited (and photographed) every known house or apartment building Sudek lived in up to the age of twenty-five, and the shack in Ujezd Street where he worked for almost thirty years. David designed a Sudek tour of Prague, parks, streets, the St. Vitus Cathedral, for his own edification. He visited private collections, pored over books and articles, even commissioned out of his own pocket a few translations of exhibition catalogues from French, Czech and Japanese. In fact, that is how he met Katrine Novak: he found her name through a Czech publishing house and hired her to translate a monograph on Sudek’s early work from Czech into English.

  For David, the one thing most persistent and compelling in Sudek’s photographs, generally speaking, was the artist’s melancholy nature, which was attested to by friends and substantiated by Sudek himself in rare interviews. Melancholy seemed the intensifying element in all of his work. David realized this was based more on subjective opinion than scholarship, but he was convinced of it. He liked to think of many of Sudek’s photographs as individual frames from a Czech film noir of some fifty years’ duration, each image containing a mysteriousness at once seductive to and exacting an emotional price from whoever looked at them, a price one long desired to pay in order to feel things more deeply. David felt that Sudek’s still lifes especially had about them an atmosphere of intrigue, as if in the next room, or the next street over, life was perhaps not so still. He had published an article in a journal saying those very things. Though the editor praised it, the journal received no written response to David’s article.

  David’s grandfather on his mother Ardith’s side had been born in Prague. When David was eleven, his mother showed him some old, yellowed family photographs taken in Czechoslovakia—what was then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire—in the late 1800s. David asked, “Which one is grandfather?” Ardith replied, “None—these are photographs your grandfather took.” It proved to be a short-lived delusion, but David thought somehow his own photography might prove original enough to dignify a sense of provenance. However, after photographing in Prague whenever he could, it became evident that his work was at best second-rate Sudek, all inherited sensibility, the master’s influence insistent in almost every photograph David took, even those he meditated on for weeks in advance. This was a kind of artistic malady; in effect, he could only sit next to Sudek on a park bench, stand when Sudek stood, follow a few steps behind, nod to the same passersby, similarly adjust his light meter and lens readings. A shadow photographer.

 
At a low point of his creative life, David, after mulling it over through a sleepless night, took it upon himself to organize his research on Sudek with the intention of writing some sort of biographical monograph or intimate study. He had always written well. This was the better choice, really. Because he had to admit that despite his technical skills, as a photographer he failed to discover an individual aesthetic. Still and all, in London he more than kept around photography. He taught a history of photography night course sponsored by the Tate Gallery. The longtime instructor, Mitchell Bowen, had fallen ill and suggested David as a fill-in. However, Bowen’s illness proved more serious than anticipated; he had to retire and David stayed on.

  David knew that for the Tate it was a matter of convenience, but he was determined to do a good job—to keep the employment. By the time he met Maggie, he was in his third year of teaching the course. Each class was comprised of fifteen students whose ages varied greatly. The course extended over two academic semesters, September through May, with the usual Christmas-New Year break. Class met from six to ten o’clock on Monday evenings. The first year of teaching, the thoroughness of David’s preparation overcompensated for any ambivalence he felt, worry about getting stymied halfway through a lecture, a sense of fraudulence in the very role of teacher. The second and third years he still fiddled with lecture notes late into Sunday nights, but he was far more comfortable with the work. Critical evaluations from students were more than favorable. The Tate was pleased. David grew to enjoy the discussions, often spiced his lectures with gossipy anecdotes from his historical research and conversations with other photographers in London. Truth be told, along with his intermittent love affair with Katrine Novak and dinners with his photography group, students were David’s social life. He had never thought of himself as a loner, just someone who was alone a lot. Both his parents were dead and buried, in different cemeteries in Vancouver. He had socked away their life insurance money. His steepest expenditures were on film and travel fares. He had his modest teaching salary. He liked living in London.

  It was love at first sight. On April 13 Maggie had accompanied the Dalhousie Ensemble to London. It was the first stop on a six-city European and Scandinavian tour. The ensemble put up at Durrants Hotel and the next day began morning rehearsals at Queen Elizabeth Hall. It was nearly 2 P.M. and had begun raining. David was sitting in the bar just down the hall from the lobby, drinking a ginger ale to soothe his stomach. The bartender was watching a rugby match on television. At a wooden table three window washers scheduled to clean the hotel’s outside windows sat in black leather chairs, smoking and talking, celebrating the turn in weather. “Nice of this rain to give us this time together, eh lads?” one said. “Let’s not even suggest doing the inside windows. Let’s just keep mum about that, what?” They clinked beer mugs. Their buckets and squeegees were in a corner. David finished his ginger ale and decided to head home; he’d left his umbrella in his flat. When he stepped into the lobby he saw Maggie sitting in a high-backed chair of hard red leather with wooden armrests. She was reading a book. He tilted his head in order to take in the cover and tide, The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard. He had not heard of the author, Anatole France. She looked up from the book, not at David, checked her watch, stood and walked outside under the awning. David immediately went there too. That is where they met, David with his jacket caped over his head, Maggie waiting for a doorman to flag down a cab.

  To David, the simple fact was love at first sight. The moment provided the definition. He felt a complete realignment of emotions, along with the unbearable advance regret at not seeing this woman again. Whatever her name might be, whatever her life might be. He felt these like pangs, felt them almost hypnotically. He was prepared to get into his own taxi and despite all cinematic cliché order the driver to “follow that cab,” he felt such stupefying urgency about her. If your heart is sinking you must act on it, “follow that cab,” like a 1940s gumshoe trying to catch up with his own fate. Had Maggie not paid him any mind, he might have done that very thing. He was aware, for an instant, of wanting this to be a philosophical moment, earned by years of waiting for it; wanted to maintain control of his senses. When all he really felt was apprehension and nerves and bewildering abandon, all enough to nearly render him dumb. Of course, one should never expect such good fortune. Not unless you are self-deluded beyond reason. That is just not the world. No, if it is love at first sight, you simply are in it. You cannot hope to step back and observe. His muddle-headedness was such that he could only eavesdrop on his own brain as it came up with nothing but “Hello,” which he said. He and Maggie Field looked at each other’s face, studied it, you might say, for just a moment.

  “Actually, I can stand flirtation only in small doses,” she said. “So that sufficed.”

  “My name is David Kozol.”

  A cab then pulled up. The doorman opened its back door and Maggie said, “If I want to introduce myself, I’ll be back in about an hour. I’m not staying at this hotel.” She then crouched into the back seat and did not look out the window. The cab moved away from the hotel.

  David went back into the lobby and sat in the same chair that Maggie had. He realized that he did this on purpose. He thought, There are other chairs available. The man he had met earlier for lunch, portly Harrison Macomb, a publisher of coffee-table books about painters, photographers, sculptors, sauntered into the lobby. A few days before, David had arranged this lunch to discuss his Sudek monograph or book or whatever it might become. During lunch Macomb had expressed genuine interest but could not commit without a detailed prospectus. He mentioned that his daughter, Maude—“Married name Maude Harvey”—had taken David’s history of photography course. “My daughter said it was occasionally brilliant,” Macomb said. “I don’t of course expect a book from you that is only occasionally brilliant, mind you.” After lunch Macomb stayed at their table for a drink but David begged off; their conversation had twisted his stomach and he went into the bar for that ginger ale.

  Macomb tucked into his raincoat, then noticed David. “Ah, Kozol,” he said. “Still here, I see. My car’s coming round. Drop you somewhere?”

  “No, thank you. I like hotel lobbies. I’ll sit here awhile.”

  “I’ll be in touch, then. A real understanding you’ve got about this Mr. Sudek. We’ve a future together in it, rest assured.”

  A chauffeur-driven Bentley waited out front. The doorman escorted Macomb under a hotel umbrella the few steps from awning to curb, held open the car door. David saw Macomb tip the doorman.

  Room 334

  IN FACT, Maggie returned to Durrants Hotel in a little more than an hour. She paid the cabbie, got a receipt, stepped from the cab and stood on the sidewalk just to the left of the awning. She smoothed down her dress, thought, I’ve worn this two days in a row now. But if she went upstairs to change, David might notice. She might then have to say, “Well, all right, so I am staying here. But a woman today has to be careful,” or something like that. What did she owe him? She did not know him in the least. It had stopped raining but still threatened rain. She saw David Kozol through the window into the dimly lit bar. He sat at a small table, a glass in front of him. When he turned toward the window (he had been turning toward it frequently) and saw Maggie, he immediately started for the lobby. She viewed what happened next as a kind of choreography, how the short-sleeved young waiter lifted David’s glass and napkin, how the window washers leaned back laughing in unison, how David waved at her over his shoulder as he disappeared into the hallway. It was a view, she thought, through an amorous window.

  Amorous window. The phrase derived from a concept she had read about in a Japanese novel, a philosophical love story. Back in 1983, she had fallen in love for a short time with a visiting professor of history, Shizuko Tushimo, who gave her this novel. In broad outline, the concept of the amorous window was that passion of a sudden and unprecedented intensity can imbue a window with palpable eroticism. In the Japanese story—now Maggie remembered the tit
le and author, The Café Window, by Yasushi Inoue—the final irony was, years after an affair, the woman character recalls the window but not the name of her beloved. The window remains clear in her mind, rain-streaked, spectral, whereas the man in question has faded from memory Standing in front of Durrants Hotel, Maggie, who had heretofore considered romance pretty much an abject condition, realized that no matter the outcome of her meeting with this David Kozol, she had long desired to experience an amorous window. And here, on an April afternoon in London, she was looking through one.

  In the intervening time between leaving and returning to the hotel, Maggie attended to the perfunctory task of finalizing a schedule of radio interviews several of the ensemble’s musicians would hold with Paul Marchand, the concert hall’s publicist. Marchand would offer these to newspapers, music journals, classical-music radio programs. It was standard procedure on these tours and Maggie was very good at it. Marchand, in his early forties, was pleasant enough. His all-business demeanor proved perfect for keeping Maggie focused. Though at one point she thought, What am I hoping will happen next? It was a brief interlude of preoccupation, merely seconds. Snapping back to the present, she said, “Excuse me, I have to use the ladies room.” When she sat down at the table again in Marchand’s office, she found him putting papers into his briefcase. He looked up and said, “Actually, Miss Field, I think we’ve covered everything. Tea?”

  “Oh, sorry, can’t,” she said. “I’ve got an assignation—appointment, I mean.” The slip surprised Maggie, who felt disappointments were in direct proportion to expectations, so best keep expectations low; how certain she was that David Kozol would be waiting at Durrants Hotel. Marchand arranged for a cab.