Devotion

by Howard Norman

  “You came all this way to tell me I’m a second-rate photographer?”

  “That would only be kind. No, I’m saying—and it’s just like you not to see it. I am saying you took photographs which associated me with predictable surroundings. Is this over your head? Maybe it is. So, it occurred to me you all along felt I was part of predictable life. Still, I liked spending time with you, David, even some of the nights. Some of them, my friend.”

  “I—”

  “Let me ask you something. Did you tell your Margaret about me? Did you tell this new wife about me? If you didn’t, perhaps somewhere deep down you haven’t really left me yet. Though don’t flatter yourself, it wouldn’t matter.”

  “No, I didn’t feel any need to tell her.”

  “Need. Want. Hope. All such bullshit. You know what I always thought? All those talks we had, when you spoke all that—how to say it? Self-deprecation. See, I’m not a translator for nothing, huh? I found the right word. All that self-deprecation you like so much, David. I’ve concluded it’s all actually a form of self-regard, ‘the wonder of me’ bullshit.”

  “We had a lot of good conversations, Katrine. Come on, they weren’t all—”

  “I think what I think.”

  Katrine smoked and David stared off at the wall, out the window. “You know,” she said, “just now, I feel in my stomach it was bad fortune to see you again. Maybe a mistake. Except it was important to me—and my boyfriend Pavel agreed, by the way. Important to me to not send you a letter, but to look at your face. Not be the coward with a letter.”

  “There’s probably a flight to Prague tonight.”

  “No, I’m going to look at London a day or two. I thought it might take that long to find you. I have a room elsewhere.”

  “I’m sorry you came all this way, Katrine. I meant well with my letter.”

  “How can such a letter mean well? An idiot would say such a thing.” She reached into her purse again, took out David’s letter, along with other sheets of paper with Czech writing on them. “By the way, I’m publishing my translation of your letter to me.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Look.” She held up the Czech pages. “Yes, I got back to writing stories, like I used to before I started translating. A few editors asked if I had anything. This inspired me to try again. So, I took much of the summer to work on a story. A very good journal has accepted it. I was paid for it. Pavel likes it very much. It’s about a man and woman who fall in love, then fall hard out of it; his name is David Kozol. Hers is not Katrine. Anyway, she finally—how do you say it? Dumps this David. But he cannot take it, so he writes a letter—this is your letter to me, word for word. I translated it out on my typewriter. He shows all his friends this letter, to try and prove he is a very reasonable, nice man. They all never wish to see him again. That’s my ending. It should be published soon. December, I think.”

  “You can’t be telling me the truth, Katrine.”

  “Maybe yes, maybe no—what difference? You can’t read it anyway. Unless you pay me to translate it.”

  They sat through Katrine’s smoking another cigarette. David ordered a glass of whiskey, then a second. Katrine drank a vodka. They didn’t speak much at all. At last Katrine said, “I think you can’t be too sad to see me, David. Because why? Because you haven’t got up to go to your room, have you?”

  “Neither sad nor happy, Katrine. Just taken aback.”

  “Know what I am? I am tired and hungry. How about it, David, dinner with an old friend? I will telephone my Pavel and tell him I’m having dinner with you. He’ll appreciate that I told him.”

  “I don’t think dinner’s a good idea.”

  “I hate good ideas. You know this about me.”

  David smiled at her familiar contrariness.

  “I’m hungry, too, I suppose. Dinner, then you’ll get a cab to your hotel, right?”

  She went to the telephone booth in the hallway and called Pavel. He was a doctor. She reached him at his office. After describing how she’d “looked David Kozol in the eye,” she said, “It’s nothing, really. It’s only dinner.” Pavel told her that he had a patient waiting; that he loved her; that he would pick her up at the airport, just let him know when.

  They took a table near the window. “The truth is, David, you were so seldom in Prague,” she said. “And I never came to London. I never suggested I visit you in London. You never asked. This not asking went on for four years, almost.” The waiter came to the table. Katrine said, “Your best Italian Chianti, please.” The waiter nodded approval and went into the kitchen. When the wine was poured, Katrine clinked her glass against David’s, said, “To old times. Means, we tried each other out and lived to tell the tale, yes?” But they didn’t tell any tales, not really. They ate in pretty much a comfortable silence. They shared a second bottle. No dessert. “Coffee in your room, my friend, David,” Katrine said. “Then I’ll get my taxicab.”

  “Katrine, how about coffee in the bar?”

  “Be polite, David. I traveled a long ways to say goodbye in person. I’ll say it over coffee, then get my cab.”

  In his room, Katrine sat on the sofa, David in the chair opposite her. A bottle of wine, compliments of the hotel, sat on the glass-topped table in between. Katrine opened it, poured them each a glass. Room service delivered a pot of coffee. They didn’t pour any yet. On they talked. What about, David, only a day later, couldn’t remember. Mostly, increasingly drunken non sequiturs. They dozed off, startled awake, the room a kind of emotional purgatory; neither was particularly animated; no buttons got unbuttoned; they eventually fell asleep. David in the chair, Katrine on the sofa. Yet here was the thing, of course: the fact of Katrine’s being in David’s hotel room—the fact from which every consequent form of collapse emanated—meant David had dropped Maggie’s trust, whether she ever found out about it or not. True, the evening constituted David and Katrine’s final parting of ways, but it had taken place after his marriage to Maggie. This chronology offered its own judgment.

  The hotel room, with its metallic-tasting water, a pocket of rust somewhere along the pipes, nicely appointed as it was.

  William knocked on David’s door at 7:55 in the morning. This was August 19, the day William had his noon appointment with Reginald Aston, royal swankeeper. Katrine heard the knock just as she stepped from the shower. She’d felt grubby and hung over—disgusting, really—but was in fairly good humor. She’d put on the plush terrycloth robe provided by the hotel and opened the door. William was dressed in a brown corduroy sports jacket with elbow patches, a white shirt, khaki trousers, sensible walking shoes. He was holding a small gift-wrapped package. Katrine held open the door and said, “Yes?”

  William looked at Katrine’s face, admired it. He noticed especially her skin, a bit flushed from the steam; the bathrobe was more than evident. Then he looked past her and saw David groaning awake. Katrine said, “David, this man is definitely perhaps not a stranger to you, I think. Should he come in, then?”

  David stood up in his rumpled clothes and looked at William. “David,” William said, not moving from the doorway but holding up the box. “I thought you might bring this to Margaret. It’s a small vase with real dragonflies somehow blown into it. I was told the fact it was made in 1890 warranted the price.”

  “She’ll like it very much,” David said.

  “I’ve suddenly changed my mind. Now I think it’s best I give this vase to my daughter in person. When I get back to Canada.” His voice held a kind of stark conviction, but his face betrayed little. He grasped the doorknob, didn’t offer Katrine the least further acknowledgment, backed out into the hallway and solidly shut the door behind him.

  Tightening its belt and holding the robe closed at the neck, Katrine looked at a stunned David, then said, “Oh, I see in your face you certainly yes are married.”

  Wrenched by William’s presence, still brain-muddled from all the wine, and with what Katrine felt to be an almost comic franti
cness, David flew into action. He looked for his shoes, found them in the bathroom, not recalling how they’d got there. He splashed cold water on his face, then took some deep breaths. He pressed his forehead to the mirror above the sink, as if to keep thoughts inside, and said to himself, “We saw a swan in a car together, in the Hebrides.” He pounded the mirror with his fist. It might have shattered, but didn’t.

  As Katrine got dressed, what sprung to her mind—she being constantly susceptible to literary references—was the English title of a novel by Louisa May Alcott she’d translated into Czech, A Long Fatal Love Chase. She said the title aloud with world-weary resignation, as if it somehow forecasted what David had now begun as he hurried past her into the hallway. He raced down the stairs and out onto George Street, observed by John Franco and the concierge. He ran toward the intersection where he knew William could catch a bus, or, fueled by whatever William might be fueled by—rage, disappointment, disgust, sadness, the combinations were interminable—could easily begin a crosstown walk. David had chosen correctly: he caught immediate sight of William, of all things just sitting at a café table, like any man out for breakfast. A cup of tea and a muffin were on the table, along with the gift-wrapped box.

  “William,” David said, approaching the table.

  William looked up, took David in, stood, and without a moment’s hesitation lifted the cup and flung its contents. Tea splashed against David’s chest. He winced in pain but continued forward, grasped William’s shoulders and said, “Please, listen. William, there was nothing—” True and not true. William grabbed hold of David’s shirt and pushed him backward, letting go. David careened against a nearby table but didn’t fall.

  “What are my choices?” William said. He stepped forward and took a wild swing, which David easily ducked. One of the two women standing behind the pastry counter shouted, “Stop it, you bloody idiots!” The other had already picked up the wall telephone and dialed the police. “Go on, both of you—get out of here!”

  William and David seemed almost calmly to escort each other out of the café, but once on the street, William took another swing, which David deflected downward, grabbing and yanking William’s arm so that his father-in-law fell to the sidewalk. William quickly got to his feet. David held his hands palms-out and said, “William, just listen, will you, please?”

  David moved forward. William moved back and stumbled off the curb, severely twisting his left ankle. He crumpled into the street. A cabbie (his name was Derek Moreland, age fifty-six), moments before, had picked up Katrine Novak in front of Durrants Hotel. He’d just glanced at her in the rearview mirror when she shouted, “Watch it!” She had recognized William ahead in the street but hadn’t noticed David. The cabbie turned to the front and said, “Fuck-all!” He leaned on the horn and braked hard but the cab thudded into William, who was trying to lift himself up.

  Katrine was thrown against the front seat. The cabbie said, “You all right?” She speechlessly nodded yes, but was obviously shaken. “The fellow possibly ain’t dead, miss.” But he could not know either way. He issued instructions to Katrine: “You stay and give a statement. Not my fault, see. The gentleman stepped right out in front of me.” Which was not exactly the case, as William was already in the street, though only for a split second. And it was an intersection. The cabbie turned off the ignition, pocketed the keys, got out of his taxi and walked to where William lay in the street. David shoved him. The cabbie said, “Hey, what? I was just—” and backed up a few steps. Katrine needed some air; she got out and leaned against the cab. “Ciggie,” she advised herself, reaching into her handbag for a cigarette. She smoked, staring at the people gathered on the sidewalk.

  David had in fact thought William was dead; there was blood at his mouth, his eyes stared up vacantly. Yet when David got on his knees and leaned close, William suddenly focused and grotesquely croaked, “Tell Mr. Aston I’ll be late.”

  The ambulance arrived in less than ten minutes. Three paramedics spilled out, attended to William. One asked William a question, said to the others, “He can’t get out the words, mates.” The youngest paramedic reported this and more to a doctor on standby over a kind of walkie-talkie, listened, then said, “Got it, got it, got it. Right.” He placed the walkie-talkie in its holster on his belt. The paramedics conferred a moment, then fit a plastic collar around William’s neck.

  “Here we go, then,” one said, and all scrupulously lifted William sideways onto a stretcher, carried the stretcher to the ambulance. One paramedic got in behind the wheel, a second sat in front on the passenger’s side, the last climbed in back. David said, “I’m his son-in-law.” The paramedic in back said, “Right, then,” so David boosted himself up and sat next to William. Siren. Faces blurred past. On the sprint to the hospital the paramedic said, “Don’t try to talk, sir,” and hooked up an IV just as William blacked out.

  Skywritten

  THE FIRST WEEK of October 1986, a letter accepting David’s book proposal, Light and Dark: The Photographs of Josef Sudek, arrived from Harrison Macomb. In fact, it was the second letter Macomb had sent. The first, back in June 1985, was forwarded to the Tate Gallery by David’s landlord. The Tate had no recourse but to send it back to Macomb. David had pretty much cut off all of his old contacts. “I thought perhaps you’d become a bellman at Durrants Hotel and given up writing altogether!” Macomb wrote. “You seemed so at home in their lobby. But I’m told I’ve now found the proper address. At any rate, Mr. Kozol, I trust you still wish to write your book. You must ring me up and we’ll discuss terms. Please know that I can offer a decent advance, but cannot make you a fortune unless the book makes me one. That said, your proposal was quite brilliant. I read closely and admired your other writings on Sudek. My staff thought highly of them as well.”

  David telephoned Macomb the next morning at 5 A.M., Nova Scotia time. Full of apologies, he said he’d gotten married and was now living in Canada, and added the lie that in between he’d been doing research. “My wife’s expecting our first child in November,” David said. “But I can certainly begin organizing my notes and get to work on the writing in, say, December.”

  “I don’t tell my authors how to schedule their time, Mr. Kozol, but let’s try to settle on a reasonable deadline, shall we? I prefer not editing until a first draft is completed. I’ve worked different ways with different writers, but that’s my preference. Might that suit you?”

  “This is my first book, but it sounds fine.”

  “Tecosky Estate, Parrsboro, Nova Scotia—still your address?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. Well, busy day here, Mr. Kozol, busy day in progress. Congratulations, finally. Glad to have caught up with you. A contract will be sent within a month. Look it over.”

  “Thank you very much, Mr. Macomb.”

  “Lunch again at Durrants when you’re next in town?”

  “Of course.”

  That afternoon near the pond, David showed Macomb’s letter to William. “I take it you’d like me to report this to Margaret?” he said. “But good for you. Some form of employment, at least, when you most need it, whatever your and my daughter’s living arrangements. Maybe write to Isador and Stefania. Thank them for letting me keep you on. I think once the child’s born, a modest raise in salary might be forthcoming. Considering their devotion to Margaret.”

  All over Nova Scotia, the heat wave continued without reprieve through October. Some days were tolerable, others stifling, the nights on average fifteen to twenty degrees warmer than what was typical of the season. On the health front, William now walked up and down the stairs for exercise; he’d extended his daily constitutional, half a mile from the mailbox along Route 2 and back. His voice therapy had ended; he was reading articles from National Geographic, and sea and island tales by Robert Louis Stevenson and Joseph Conrad, aloud in a moderate voice at night in bed. “Nothing like being read to,” he’d joked to Maggie. His primary anodyne was aspirin (also a glass of whiskey before sleep).


  As for David, his bruises—brought about by what William referred to as the “Edinburgh-Parrsboro Express,” as if he’d been waiting since childhood to throw a punch with such resolve behind it—lingered in lighter hues, and his jaw was still a bit numb. William had a folder of suggested recipes, provided by the hospital, and during the first few weeks of his son-in-law’s recovery, he had used an electric blender to prepare concoctions of meat, vegetables and vitamins in liquid form, which David ate mostly through a straw. On October 21 David had his jaw unwired, an arduous procedure that required an anesthetic. William took him home from the hospital at 3 P.M. in the truck, a sudden deep rut in the road jolting David’s skull like a relapse. Once in the guesthouse, David immediately took to his bed, and slept until four the next morning. He woke hearing static from the radio.

  A few days later, William sat with David at the guesthouse’s kitchen table, eating a dinner of egg salad sandwiches, soft pear slices and ice water. They said little during the meal. David cleared the dishes and they repaired to the porch, where David pressed an ice pack to the side of his face. They sat in opposite porch swings, feet planted on the slat floor. “Both these swings need oiling,” William said.

  “I’ll get to it,” David said.

  They sat not talking for a good fifteen minutes, looking out toward the pond. Then William said, “Children’s zoo keeps asking for our swans, but I told them as long as this heat keeps up, I prefer they stay here with us.”

  William had got the swans in the pen before dinner; he’d seen a fox crossing to the estate side of Route 2. At about seven o’clock there was the slightest of breezes. Veering in from the north, all at once there arrived a flock of wild swans. In successive groups of six, eight and ten, they settled in the pond with scarcely a splash, spreading out with impressive equanimity over its breadth. From his vantage point William saw their initial approach; David turned in time to see them light. “Those are whistling swans. Cygnus columbianus. Naomi said they got here late August last year,” William said. “Let’s go down and have a look.”