by Brian Moore
What was she going to say? I stared at her. The man stared too, his fork in mid-air.
‘Is that the Sainte-Chapelle?’
Above the banquette where the poor man was lunching was a French Government poster of the Sainte-Chapelle and so I said yes it was. The man, chewing inelegantly, swivelled around and looked at the poster on the wall behind him while I sat there, my face hot, wanting to pinch Janice, thinking, my God, we Canadians are always going on about Americans, how loud and show-offy they are, but what about this? And so, ashamed of Janice, anxious to dissociate myself from her, I picked up the menu and pretended to study it.
‘Ah,’ she said. ‘Now, I’m going to prove to you that it was you who told me about this place.’
She opened her purse, produced her little notebook and hunted in it. ‘Here we are,’ she said and pushed a scribbled page under my eyes and there was my name, mary, and, after it, Le Plat du Jour. Speciality: Endives Flamandes. I read it and then realized what it was I’d told her, which was to try Endives Flamandes, one of the plats du jour at Chez Napoléon at Fiftieth and Ninth. She had misunderstood, written down Le Plat du Jour as a restaurant and, by coincidence, found one by that name. If it were anyone else but Janice I’d have laughed and told her about her mistake but instead I picked up the menu, hoping that by some crazy luck I’d find Endives Flamandes on it. For I remembered Janice’s moods, knew that somewhere close to the surface of her seemingly large self-esteem there is another, terrified Janice, a Janice who could break down and weep over this trivial error, a Janice capable of turning a small misunderstanding into an hour-long session of recrimination in an effort to prove that, somehow, she had not been wrong, could not be wrong, never was, never would be, world without end, amen, wrong.
‘Oh, dear,’ I said, falsely. ‘Endives doesn’t seem to be on today.’
‘Isn’t it? Too bad. Never mind, perhaps there’s something else you recommend?’
‘Rognons,’ I said. ‘Do you like kidneys?’
‘Are they good here?’
‘Yes,’ I said. And then, going on with my lie, ‘At least, they were the last time I was here.’
Good, she said, rognons it was and she ordered moules ravigottes to start with and a small carafe of white and a half-bottle of Brouilly, making it all very much a commande in loud French, the waiter nodding, saying ‘Très bien’, and Janice looking around her, smiling as though for an audience, and then, I forget, what did we talk about before Hat? I don’t remember. How did he come up? Yes. Janice said, ‘I bumped into McKinnon the other night at a party. Do you remember him? He remembers you.’
I remembered him. I thought of him coming out of his private office at Canada’s Own Magazine one winter afternoon. The Warm Brown Turd, Hat called him, and it was dead on, he even looked like a turd in his perennial fawn shirt, brown tie, brown suit, and shiny brown shoes. That terrible time, with me trying to get Hat to slip away quietly, everybody suddenly aware of the trouble, as Hat, obviously drunk, came in very late and sat down to write his column. And, McKinnon’s voice, ‘Get your coat on, Bell, do you hear me, Bell, or are you too rotten stinking drunk? Go on, get out.’ And Hat so very drunk I don’t think he did hear McKinnon. Then McKinnon looked at me and asked, ‘Who let him get this way? Were you with him?’ And I, Simon Peter to Hat’s drunken Christ, yes, I denied him.
‘Of course,’ I said to Janice. ‘I remember McKinnon. He hired me on Canada’s Own.’
‘Gosh, yes. Silly of me,’ she said. ‘I always think of your acting, I forget your magazine days. Anyway, he asked after you. He knew you were divorced from Hat, but he didn’t know you were living in New York. He told me they’re putting out an anthology of Hat’s war-time stuff: McClelland and Stewart, I think. And they’ve asked McKinnon to write a preface.’
‘But why McKinnon? That turd. Hat used to call him the Warm Brown Turd. God, Hat would be furious, why couldn’t they get somebody else, anybody’d be better than that bastard, what’s he got to do with Hat, that shit, all he ever did for Hat was try to fire him.’
And, oh, my voice, talk about Janice being close to the surface of panic, there I was, far too loud, saying filthy words, turd and shit, shaking like a madwoman in simple bloody anger at the injustice of McKinnon writing a preface to Hat’s one and only book, Hat, poor Hat who’d wanted all his life to write a book, first a novel, then a biography of Louis Riel and then, something else – I forget – it came to nothing. And now, at long last someone decides to put those wartime pieces of his between hard covers and Sweet Jesus Our Saviour they ask R. J. McKinnon, the Warm Brown Turd, to write the official foreword to the words of Hatfield Kent Bell. Dear Old Canada, wouldn’t you know it, the people who shat on Hat while he was alive will be the first to rise up and claim they knew him then. And what can he say? He’s dead.
And I, what right have I to act holy about all this? I left him. They say that killed him.
But there, in the restaurant, I blamed McKinnon. I remember saying, in a loud voice, ‘It’s just not fair.’ Then I tried to drink some of my Bloody Mary and spilled it and Janice gave me Kleenex from her purse and said she knew Jack McClelland, the publisher, he was a very nice guy and if I liked she would write Jack and suggest somebody else, someone Hat would approve of. And who would be the right person to do it, who did I think?
Which was the very best thing she could have said for it made me forget my shaking in an effort to think who would be the right person to do the foreword, who would Hat have chosen? Meanwhile, Janice signalled the waiter and there was a second Bloody Mary beside me. I remember thinking she did that efficiently, just as Hat would have done it. Who could write the foreword? Names: A. J. Liebling, Scotty Reston, Edmund Wilson, impossible of course, none of those people ever heard of Hat. But they were who he would have liked. Liebling, especially. Then I remembered that Leibling is dead. And Hat is dead. And that there just isn’t anybody in Canada.
‘What about Reid Stanfield?’
‘Oh God,’ I said. ‘That ass. Why do they need a foreword, anyway?’
‘I suppose to tell who he was?’ Janice said.
When she said that, tears came into my eyes. Oh, Hat, who were you? Did anybody know, did you know? Will this little book of your writings bring you to life, will it prove that you thought, therefore you were? I doubt it and there, in the restaurant, the sadness of it would not leave me and so, holding Kleenex to my mouth and nose, pretending I’d had a fit of the sneezes, I rose and went down among the crowded tables to the ladies’ washroom where (alone, thank God) I stood in a one-minute silence by the washbasin and wept for Hat. Remembering that sad epitaph:
‘Why do they need a foreword?’
‘I suppose to tell who he was?’
I wonder: why, why, do I still feel our lives must have some purpose? I don’t know. But there in the washroom, thinking of the sadness of this meaningless, posthumous book, a book which would have so delighted Hat, if he were alive, I wept. I stood at the washroom mirror, great black, coal-miner smudges of mascara around my eyes, my lipstick all washed off, and there in the midst of my tears I thought of the man at the traffic light and laughed, for I thought, if that sick bastard walked into the ladies’ room and saw my face now, he wouldn’t say I want to fuck you, baby. No, he wouldn’t. But my laughter, which began by liberating me, refused to leave me and became hysterical. Which frightened me, so, still laughing, I wet a paper towel and wiped my forehead, then washed my face in cold water, another me taking charge, the sensible me who talks to Mad Twin in a condescending Grown-Up way, saying come on, girl, get a hold of yourself, stop this nonsense. A hateful person, this Girl Guide Mistress, an amalgam, I suspect, of all the grown-ups who lectured me when I was a child. Anyway, that sensible person talked that other person I fear out of her hysterical laughter; it was Sensible Self who stretched out an arm very straight, inspected the tips of fingers for tremor and announced that make-up could again be applied.
Then, as I began to put on my ey
eliner, a third self took over, an indulgent My Buddy persona who suggested I go back and have that second Bloody Mary Janice had ordered for me. Enjoy your lunch, My Buddy advised me. Get a little bun on. Just keep Janice off the subject of Hat and the old days. She said she didn’t want to talk about Montreal. Remind her of that. Make a joke of it.
Sensible Self and My Buddy having done their work, the make-up job satisfactory if not great, I went back into the restaurant, which now seemed very crowded, waiters everywhere, not an empty table or chair, and everywhere that noise, noise, noise, which is the heart of the New York lunch hour. I remember consulting my dress watch as I went towards our table, and it was one forty-five. I remember Janice looking up, worried, then smiling, reassured at the sight of me. By now the table was cluttered with the remains of my first drink, the fresh drink Janice had ordered for me, her own drink, then a carafe of white wine with two glasses, two portions of moules ravigottes, a blue Gitanes ashtray, Janice’s handbag and gloves. And as I sat down she said, ‘Don’t you look marvellous, sometimes I hate you, what am I talking about, I always hate you, that marvellous hair of yours, you never have to do a thing to it, do you? My damn hair’s so fine, every hairdresser I’ve ever gone to has thrown up his hands in disgust.’
I said, ‘I just spent an hour at the hairdresser’s before coming to lunch.’
‘Did you? Well, it was worth it, I must say.’ She put the fresh Bloody Mary in front of me. ‘Come on, now,’ she said. ‘You’re behind. Oh, Mary, what fun to see you again.’
But it wasn’t the same as when she’d said it in the taxi. Now, she was a reminder of days I do not want to remember and so, anxious to hurry through lunch and get away from her, I picked up the fresh Bloody Mary, poured half of it into her glass, and said, ‘Please? Help me with this, will you?’
She smiled and nodded. She clinked glasses with me. We sipped, then put the glasses down, looking at each other, she fondly, I pretending. ‘Did I tell you about Woody and Kate?’
‘No,’ I said.
‘They’ve separated.’
I nodded. The wrong thing to do, for she said, at once, ‘Aren’t you surprised?’
‘It’s not that,’ I said. ‘It’s –’ (but I couldn’t say it’s Hat, Woody knew Hat, it all reminds me of Hat, and so I said) ‘It’s, ah, it’s the past. I don’t like to remember those times, that’s all.’
I could see her turn this over before she accepted it. ‘Well,’ she said. ‘Of course, you’re not a real Montrealer, you were only there for a few years, it was just an episode in your life. It’s not like me.’ She stared at her drink, jiggled her glass. The green slice of lime rotated slowly in the tomato-red slime of her Bloody Mary. ‘It’s my whole life,’ she said. ‘That’s the sad part.’
‘Why sad?’ I asked but she wasn’t looking at me, she was looking across the room again and I looked to see what she saw and there, under the Sainte-Chapelle poster, was the freckly-faced, tab-collared man, grinning at her. The other men at the table were also looking in our direction and one of them, catching my eye, winked at me. Furious, trapped in this flirtatious exchange of glances, I turned to Janice. It couldn’t be, it just couldn’t, she couldn’t be trying to pick those men up, could she?
‘My mother is ill,’ I said. I don’t know why it came out like that. Yes I do, I said it because it was the one thing I could think of which might get her attention. She turned to me, looking serious, and said, ‘Ill?’ And so I began to tell her about Mama’s letter and my phone call to Dick. But, as I started to tell it, I watched her the way I’d watch a thief. Sure enough, by the time I got to Dick and the polyp, her glance began to slide past me to the men and, seeing this, I felt ashamed to be discussing something so important as my mother’s illness, with Janice staring across the room like a silly high-school girl trying to pick up boys at a soda fountain. And so, cutting my story short, I said, ‘That reminds me. How is your mother?’
‘Mother?’ said Janice. ‘Well, at least it’s harder for her to descend on me these days.’
‘She’s still living in Montreal, isn’t she?’
‘Well, yes,’ Janice said. ‘But didn’t I tell you? She’s in Briarwood now. Charles and I arranged to get her in. We had hell’s own trouble too.’
‘Briarwood?’
‘The convalescent home for old people. It’s very good. You know, she fell last winter, and she just couldn’t look after herself in her own flat any more. So we got her into Briarwood. We were lucky, there’s a huge waiting list.’
‘And does she like it?’
‘Are you kidding? It’s out in Senneville, it’s more than an hour by bus. So, of course she can’t just pop in on us any more.’
She shook her head and I saw her eyes seek out the man across the way. ‘Gratitude is something Mother just doesn’t know exists. You should hear her, you’d think Charles and I were her worst enemies. She’s so selfish, it never occurs to her I have a life of my own and that she just doesn’t fit into it.’
‘How old is she?’
‘Oh, early seventies. Of course, she had me very late. These moules are delicious, don’t you think?’
I didn’t think so but I said they were. It struck me that, after two Bloody Marys and half of mine, anything would taste good to her.
‘The phone is still the trouble,’ Janice said. ‘She still phones me every morning. It’s her umbilical cord.’
She looked back at the men. Old Mrs Dowson, Janice’s mother, is a handsome, frail old lady who reminds me of the late Queen Mary, Duchess of Teck. What I remember about her is one day I went to see Janice and Janice was out and there was her mother, also arrived to pay her a visit, waiting in the little back garden of Janice’s house in Montreal West. It was a hot summer’s day and Mrs Dowson, who is very tall, sat hunched up uncomfortably in a garden chair, leafing through a copy of some French magazine: I had met her once or twice before but had never really spoken to her. We exchanged some vapid remarks about the weather and Janice’s whereabouts and then, out of things to say, sat in silence. Her eye went to her magazine so I picked up the New Yorker.
Then, as we turned magazine pages, suddenly she said, ‘Nonsense, he did not smell.’
I looked at her. She was shaking her head over the magazine. ‘Who?’ I asked.
‘Rasputin. They say here he smelled badly. Not true. Not when I met him.’
I remember wondering if she was going a bit senile, but no, I asked where she’d met Rasputin and she told me that before her marriage she was a governess, she had spent five years working for the Duc de Mirepont; in 1913, it seems, the Mireponts went on a grand tour, taking their ‘Miss Anglaise’ with them and in Moscow at a tea given by the Tsarina for the Duchess, Rasputin walked in, sat down, ate three cakes very greedily, drank a cup of tea, showed the children a conjuring trick with a coin, behaving all the time as if the Tsarina’s private apartments were his own. ‘I knew no Russian, of course,’ Mrs Dowson said. ‘So I have no way of judging him. But he seemed very pleasant, and certainly he was fond of children. I sat next to him. He did not smell.’
Dowdy, old, hunched uncomfortably in that garden chair. I remember staring at her, at this woman who had travelled in Imperial Russia, who had taken tea with Rasputin and the Tsarina. Is there anything in Janice’s life, in my life, as strange as that? I remember when Janice came back I said how extraordinary, her mother’s life. Janice said, ‘Oh, she met Proust too, didn’t you, Mother? And the pity was, of course, Mother didn’t know who he was, she thought he was someone mixed up in the Dreyfus case.’ I looked again at her mother, who smiled a timid smile. ‘Proust?’ I said. ‘What was he like?’ But Janice gave me a warning look and at once called me into the kitchen on some pretext. ‘Look,’ she told me, ‘I don’t want to sound mean, but Mother will stay here all afternoon, if you encourage her.’ And that was that. I never really heard about Proust and when, once or twice, in front of other people, I mentioned Mrs Dowson and Rasputin, Janice said, ‘Oh, yes, that,�
�� as if that was far less interesting than the sex life of Davy Powell or what Dr Raditsky thought of Graham Greene’s new novel or the colours and design of the North African rug Janice and Charles were having made up to go with the new hardwood floor in their living-room.
And so, today, listening to her complain that her mother is selfish and phones too often, I thought of memento ergo sum. Does that unwanted old widow who sits staring into the sad, coloured glooms of a television set in the lounge at Briarwood really remember the young governess who took tea with Rasputin in the Tsarina’s apartments, long, long ago? Perhaps Rasputin did smell but the old woman does not remember? Perhaps she recalls that afternoon only as I do my father’s funeral, as a story whose details she has mastered by repetition, a story she tells to strangers, hoping it will hold their attention? And, when I thought that, I became frightened, frightened not only for poor Mrs Dowson, but frightened for me, for the me who cannot remember that young Mary Dunne I was. And so, frightened, I foolishly burst out, ‘But Janice, I feel sorry for your mother. I’d phone too, if I were all alone. Wouldn’t you?’
Janice. Her eyes turned on me, eyes cold as the tiger’s eyes as he watches you watching him, watches you as he walks his measured beat in the zoo’s cage, waiting for his keeper and the day’s meat. Those eyes which saw me but did not see me, which inspected me as the tiger inspects the frieze of visitors’ faces, faces of no interest to the tiger who waits only for the slap of the bloodied hunk of horsemeat in the concrete gutter under the iron bars, the tiger to whom my interruption was just that: an interruption: who must now dispose of it with an angry flick of the strong tail, the ice-blue eyes remote, withdrawn in reverie. ‘But she’s been alone for years,’ the tiger said. ‘You don’t understand. She likes to be alone. Why do you think she divorced my father, why do you think she sent me to a boarding school when I was twelve? She’s always liked to be alone. If she wants company it’s only for a few hours and on her terms. Oh, yes.’
