Devotion

by Howard Norman

  How to say it? The past has been replaced by the present with Margaret. To quote Anatole France, “Love has its own velocity.” (I can hear you just now: “You dare inform me about literature, I’ll shoot you in the heart.”) Katrine, you are a kind, good, sometimes selfish, mostly generous, very honest, beautiful soul whom I loved as much as I allowed myself to—and let’s be honest, as much as you allowed me to. It’s never just a matter of doing something “right” or “wrong,” is it? You either live steadily with the deeper emotional contingencies or you don’t, and to my mind we didn’t. Maybe too much distance and absence, London-Prague, who knows? We each had our cities. We both held back but lovely things still took place, didn’t they? Both of us tried each other out. In life you just try people out, isn’t that how you put it? I’m grateful you tried me out.

  David

  As soon as he signed his name, David went out to George Street and mailed the letter, in the box situated halfway between his building and Durrants Hotel.

  The Veterinarian

  THREE-THIRTY A.M., August 7, 1986. David is reading Manuscript of a Country Doctor. It is seemingly an endless humid night. Still, David feels a slight chill. The sentence he’s just read, “We all step into currents of despair,” may have something to do with it. He puts on a moth-eaten, dark blue sweater. Half a peach sits on a plate. The indoor cricket is chirping. The Bach suites for cello are playing.

  Not fifty feet from the house a fox—a vixen—loped across the lawn. Head low, tail nearly straight out and wavering, as if batting fox scent toward the swans in order to create panic and confusion in advance of her arrival. The swans came awake. The fox circumvented the pen, driving swans in agitated clusters from one end to the other, whichever was opposite the fox. They stepped and shit right into their wooden water trough. The fox tested the wire mesh with her teeth. In the fog it was as if they were being harangued by a ghost.

  Hearing the commotion, David went to the screen door. “What now?” he said.

  He kept a rifle in the pantry, a .22 caliber, which had sufficed when a big raccoon somehow got into the pen last winter. He took up the rifle, slid three shells into the chamber and stepped into the yard. He could scarcely make out the pen. David raised the rifle, aimed in the direction of the pond and fired all three rounds. He mainly wanted to scare off the intruder, if in fact there was one. On the third shot he thought he heard a ricochet; possibly he’d hit the metal roof of the bird feeder on its post, and a few seconds later he felt an animal brush past his leg. He looked down to see it was a fox—gone into the fog. Just like that. The fox had actually touched his bare leg, a once-in-a-lifetime thing, he thought, astonished nearly to tears. The swan’s Great Enemy had graced David with its stealth and brazen playfulness, the very human being who might have just now killed her.

  He felt so grateful, he was tempted, perversely but honestly, to sacrifice a swan to this fox, maybe just loose it in the woods, report it gone missing the next day to William, lying with conviction. Though he’d come to dearly love the swans, he now loved the fox as well. A thoughtless momentum took hold. Exhilarated, he went into the guesthouse, secured the rifle back in the pantry, grabbed a flashlight and hurried to the main house. He woke William up, saying “William, William, William” close to his ear, shaking him by the shoulder. “Wha-a-at?” William said, a bit like a star-tied goat. “Who the hell’s that?”

  “It’s me, David.” David set the flashlight on the bed. The beam mooned out against the wall. (He remembered his own father, Peter Kozol, was good at doing shadow puppets.) “A fox brushed up against my leg, William. I fired three shots at it. Guess you didn’t hear.”

  William had scarcely come into full consciousness. David rattled on about the fox. Finally William said, “Know what I thought first thing when you woke me just now? You almost got me killed in London. You fucking idiot. Not to mention everything else.” William turned on his side and went back to sleep.

  “Unforgiving son-of-a-bitch,” David said. William didn’t budge; maybe he had heard, maybe not.

  Should not have woken him like that, David thought, walking back to the guesthouse. In the middle of the night like that. Should not have expected William to celebrate a miraculous incident. Yet who else was there on the estate to tell? For the first time, at least with such inimitable clarity, it occurred to David that, over the past months, he’d tried to invest any small faith in the possibility not only that Maggie might forgive him—for Katrine Novak, the accident, his dissembling, any or all of it—but that William might consider him part of the family again. Family: he’d addressed this in his notebook. If only I was back to being part of the Field family—how inane that read. Yet it was true. If only William might put in a good word to Maggie for me. Yet now he was convinced, should he broach the latter subject, William would say, or write: Not till hell freezes over. He would need a second notebook soon.

  Stopping a moment on the porch of the guesthouse, David thought, You fucking idiot. Or heard the echo of William saying it. It seemed a fitting epitaph: David envisioned it etched on his gravestone. And where would this gravestone be? Not in the Field family plot in Scotland or in the nearby Parrsboro cemetery. No, should he die late that night of an accumulation, slow as an intravenous drip, of poisonous self-pity, corrosive guilt, not to mention desire for his wife, most likely he would be buried in a plot adjacent to one of his parents in Vancouver. He didn’t have a Last Will and Testament designating another preference. This little impasse of morbid thought depressed him no end. He felt a crick, a queasy ache in his neck, as if he’d been whiplashed by self-imposed degradation; he felt dumb as a box of rocks, a phrase he’d overheard in the Minas Bakery. Despite being alone, leaning against the screen door’s frame, David nonetheless felt embarrassed, realizing that when he’d just now uttered You fucking idiot, he’d done so in an imitation of Peter Lorre.

  In the kitchen he drank a glass of water, tried to read more of Manuscript of a Country Doctor, but his mind kept detouring. He went to the cupboard, took out a bottle of Irish whiskey, poured a shot glass, threw it back. Opened his notebook, scrawled in big sprawling letters YOU FUCKING IDIOT, then went out on the porch carrying the bottle and glass. He sat on the porch swing. Polishing off six shots in less than half an hour, he concluded that the collapse of all good things was due less to grim errors in judgment than to a self-destructive impulse natural to his character. He conjured up probably the most nefarious rationalization possible, in or out of his notebooks: The sort of thing that happened in London would’ve happened sooner or later. Therefore Maggie’s better off without me.

  Out on the lawn he wandered aimlessly. He had one loafer on; the other was on the porch. It was now well toward dawn. A mile away, lobster boats were on the Bay of Fundy. The lobstermen would see the sun rising. But the pond and surrounding woods of the estate remained socked in with fog. David stumbled to the pen. Leaning against the gate, he said, “Sss-swans, swannies,” pathetic now, the alcohol stammer, and then he began calling the swans, “Here, Marcel, here Dr. H,” both characters from novels by Anatole France. For a good two or three minutes, as he repeated the names, the swans didn’t react. Finally one trundled over to investigate, got close to David and then, as if a vaudeville cane had hooked its long neck, it effected a U-turn and joined the others near the trough.

  David lifted the latch, opened the gate and lay down, blocking the exit. Using outsize movements, like an escape artist loosening chains underwater, he removed his sweater, folded it into a pillow. “I promise I’ll go swimming with you, Dr. H,” he said, tucking his knees to his chest, closing his eyes. Half a dozen swans folded out from the corner like illustrated Japanese fans come alive. In a few moments David was dead to the world.

  Naomi Bloor drove up in her jeep. Her bimonthly examinations were always scheduled for 7 A.M. When Naomi separated a swan out, it most often reacted in a predictable way, a kind of white explosion of wild-eyed protest, until she managed to embrace the swan, chortle
“It’s okay, it’s okay,” or hum in a low monotone, then slip the leather hood over its head, at which point the swan generally stilled. She wore a catcher’s mask and chest protector, which she’d purchased in a sporting goods store in Truro. It didn’t always go smoothly. “Swans, behavior-wise,” she told David, “you have to be constantly on the alert. Seeming calm is their best trick. Because it’s right then you have to figure some nasty thought’s just started to percolate in their swan brains. Wings suddenly flare out. Bony ends of the wings, the bill, both can do real damage.” Now and then she asked David to assist. Tasks such as holding a swan’s bill closed while Naomi put in eye drops.

  On another occasion, Naomi filled David in on how the swans came to be on the estate in the first place. “I get calls from all over this part of the province,” she said. “Kids shoot them. A storm caused one to collide with a radio tower, broke its wing. Things like that. Freak accidents. Years back, word got around, the Tecoskys take in wounded swans. I brought them one myself, first year I was the neighborhood vet. You might have noticed one can’t turn its neck back to preen? It was shot in the neck’s why.”

  Naomi was thirty-six, with dark blond hair cut in what she called a “serious pageboy.” She liked how it framed her narrow face. She typically wore overalls and a cotton shirt and lace-up boots, a utilitarian outfit. While earning her degree at the University of California, Davis, she’d married another student; the marriage didn’t last a year. Her first postgraduate posting was with a veterinary clinic in Regina, Saskatchewan. When that ended, she went home to Truro to visit her parents. On this visit she read an ad in a Canadian veterinary journal announcing a “neighborhood practice” for sale in Parrsboro. She inquired by telephone and drove right over. She had lunch, then dinner with Dr. Alvin Frame, seventyone years old, who’d been born in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, and had had his Parrsboro practice for forty-seven years. He was tall but stooped, with a head full of white, unruly hair, and Naomi could tell right off he didn’t suffer fools. The next morning she drove with Dr. Frame to his office, then to the Tecosky estate. On the way he said, “The caretaker’s name is William Field. William, not Bill. I told him we were visiting.” Two hours later, while they ate sandwiches at the Minas Bakery, he said, “Ail right, Dr. Bloor, I’m satisfied you won’t reverse all my years of goodwill.”

  “I hope to extend your goodwill,” she said. This made Dr. Frame chuckle, possibly at his own obtuseness.

  “Of course you’ll do just that. You seem a very competent young woman. You have respectable bona fides. I don’t care, really, if this sounds hokey, but my longtime clients, their confidence in me, put two daughters and a son through university. But it’s time I get out. Though I won’t give up my house in Parrsboro: my wife’s buried here. As for the practice, you just study the files, you’ll be fine. It’s mostly dogs and cats. There’s Mrs. Kelb, near Economy, who keeps toucans and parrots, in cathedral cages, you’ll see. What else? It’s rare but not unheard of the forest service will bring you a deer or coyote someone’s hit with a car. I repaired a bobcat once. Like I said, it’s all in the files.”

  “I look forward to the whole thing,” Naomi said.

  “Well, you can have the whole thing. Including the deep dark secrets of my accounting methods and tax deductions. You can have my practice lock, stock and barrel, Dr. Bloor.” And then he named a price.

  Dr. Frame mailed notices of his retirement, which contained a request to welcome Dr. Naomi Bloor. Her first full day at the clinic was diverse, also exhausting. Since she wanted to make a good impression, she spent an inordinate amount of time with each patient and owner. That day, between 7:45 A.M. and 6:15 P.M., she removed porcupine quills from the face and inside the mouth of a mutt who whimpered nonstop, licking the pliers as if pleading directly with them (from 12:30 to 1:00, while she ate a tuna sandwich at the bakery, Dory Elliot told her, “Mrs. Ebbet stopped by, not expressly to say so, but still, she did say you handled yourself well with those porcupine quills. I don’t mean to make a pun, but Mrs. Ebbet can be prickly. You got an A-plus on your report card is what I’m saying”); gave regular checkups to three other dogs; put drops of medicinal astringent in the ears of a cat with ear mites. Late in the afternoon a woman from Great Village, Constance Sugrue, called, distraught that her four-year-old daughter, also Constance, used their parakeet’s droppings as fingerpaint. “She painted a whole nativity scene on a sheet of manila paper,” she said. “I think she inhaled something went to her brain, because why else would she paint a nativity so far from Christmas?” Naomi said, “I don’t have a strong background in parakeets, Constance. I’d call your family doctor. My opinion? I don’t think harm was done.”

  Driving her pickup home to her one-story house in Parrsboro that evening, Naomi stopped to buy a piece of salmon, head of lettuce, tomato, scallions, bottle of olive oil, bottle of vinegar, bottle of white wine. It was a warm night out, a salty breeze off the Bay of Fundy. Listening to the radio, she made oil-and-vinegar dressing, tossed the salad, broiled the salmon. Near dusk she sat on her porch, ate dinner and drank two glasses of wine. Three boys pedaled past on bicycles; they’d each fastened a playing card to the frame with a clothespin and the cards fluttered against the spokes. I’ve come into a good situation here, she thought. I already know Parrsboro a little bit and like what I know. I’m well past my stupid marriage. Today was a useful day. I’m going to eat my supper and not drink this whole bottle of wine, because I’ve got an 8 A.M. appointment. It’s Mrs. Boomer-Bower’s springer spaniel, Berenice. Mrs. Boomer-Bower told Naomi on the telephone, “My house is on the dirt road off Route 2, just before the cemetery.” Naomi wrote this down on a file card.

  William had apprised Naomi of the general situation between Maggie and David. (“They’re still married on paper,” he said.) “I can’t think about it much,” Naomi said. “I wasn’t invited to their wedding, as you know. Still, I wish them the best.” However, after David was caretaker for a month, she was flirtatious with him, mostly by indirection. She was scarcely conscious of this at first, then did it on purpose. While examining the swans, she sometimes filled David in on local gossip, talked “out of school” about her women friends’ “social lives.” She had something of a raunchy sense of humor, though David felt she forced it a little. Dory Elliot called her “high-strung.” David found her nice to look at, certainly that; he never confided in her, however, tried never to be anything but civil and direct in her company. He sometimes ran into her at the bakery; they’d had coffee together. He valued her intelligence, her veterinarian’s know-how.

  Naomi had other designs. Designs that seemed plausible, on the drawing board at least. The previous December she’d asked David to accompany her to a movie in Halifax. He’d said “Sure,” followed by “I’ve been feeling really cooped up here.” It was a three-hour drive round-trip, plus the movie itself, so they wouldn’t return until quite late. On the drive down they chatted freely. The theater was on Water Street. The movie was Straight Time, a psychological character study. Dustin Hoffman played a seedy fellow addicted to robbing jewelry stores; just out of prison, he takes up with a woman who loves him, but when he and another man botch a heist, things quickly go from bad to worse. The woman goes on the lam with Hoffman, but he abandons her at a gas station out in Nowheresville, USA. She asks why she can’t go with him. “Because I’m gonna get caught,” he says, and drives off.

  “Altruism was a phony reason to ditch her,” Naomi said in the lobby after the movie. “Though he did do her a favor, didn’t he?”

  When they stepped out to the street, David’s heart leapt, because he thought he glimpsed Maggie walking past. But it wasn’t her. “That Dustin Hoffman, as an actor, I mean, he really—”

  “Yes, he was very good. But the thing is, I’ve had girlfriends attracted to men like that,” Naomi said.

  Late the following January they drove in a minor blizzard to Halifax to see The Cherry Orchard, starring Megan Follows, who as a child played Anne of
Green Gables on television. Naomi noticed how David looked nervously about the theater as the audience filed in. “I don’t see her either,” she said. “And I’d understand how you’d be upset if Margaret was here.” Her saying that had been fine with David. It was the truth.

  They left at intermission. Naomi had insisted; she saw it was impossible for David to concentrate on the play. She was put out. “What a waste,” she said. “The acting was good.” What’s more, unbeknownst to David, Naomi had secured a reservation at the Haliburton House Inn, on Morris Street in Halifax. She’d stayed there on two occasions, once alone, once with an attendant at the children’s zoo. (She’d mentioned him to David. “When he said he wanted a platonic relationship, I asked didn’t he think Plato regularly slept with anyone?”) The inn was cozy and discreet, rates were reasonable, breakfast was free with good choices. In the truck, David turned on the ignition, cranked up the heat. Civility had replaced everything; still, Naomi ventured forth. She took his right hand in her left hand and held it against her forehead, as if he should check for a fever. She kissed his palm lightly. David looked out the window. Letting go his hand, Naomi faced stiffly forward. “During the play, I daydreamed us kissing like teenagers—I’ll be honest about it. Now I think better of that.”

  “Look, Naomi—”