So my father was living in a town similar to Montreal, and I had arrived on New Year’s Eve to take him by storm. The date had been unintentional. I had only learned about Calais’s military history in a chance conversation with the captain of the channel ferry.
My hotel was in the old section of Calais, just off Place d’Armes, the town’s main square. The air smelled of salt and sleet showered me as I descended from the cab. Auberge des Flots, the inn where William Howlett had dined with my father, stood before me. From the outside it seemed as dismal as the other buildings that lined the street like crowded teeth, but the interior was surprisingly warm.
A woman with a child of about two years in tow, her belly big with another, welcomed me. “Entrez, entrez,” she said, taking my umbrella and showing the driver where to put my bag. “It is no day for travel.”
She and her little boy, Charles, accompanied me to the front desk where her husband was waiting. Judging from the proliferation of keys hanging on the wall behind him I was the only guest that night, though the tavern in the next room was full of talk and laughter. After the hard Atlantic trip and ferry crossing I treated myself to a room with a view of the harbour and a private bath. The husband himself carried my bags upstairs and lit the coal fire in the grate.
My little room was soon warm. It had been decorated simply, in colours bright enough to offset the weather, and soon I felt quite cheered. The trip and the meeting with Howlett had depleted me. When the innkeeper’s wife came upstairs with a plate of soup I inquired about the address Howlett had scribbled out for me.
“Rue de Verel,” she said, squinting in the gas light. “Bien sûr je la connais. It is a bit of a walk from the auberge, down in the quartier Courgain-Maritime where the fishermen live. Who is it you are seeking?”
“Dr. Bourret.” I marvelled at how easily the name came out. I felt no shame anymore, just a slight quickening of my pulse, which settled almost immediately.
“The doctor. Yes, that is where he is located. I am not good with directions but my husband will indicate the way for you. You are planning to go tomorrow?”
Instinctively I liked this young woman, with her ready smile and hospitality, but I did not wish to talk. Calais was a foreign place but it was still a town. Having grown up in St. Andrews East I knew how fast news travelled, and also how it could distort. I thanked my hostess for her kindness and concentrated on my soup, nudging the conversation to more neutral topics.
As soon as she had gone back downstairs I unpacked my bags. Not my clothes — for apart from the ones I had on I had just one other outfit — but the bag full of things I had brought for my father. Choosing them had been difficult for it had forced me to put myself in his shoes and imagine what he might wish to see of my life. It had made me realize how little I actually knew about him. Forty-four years ago, my eyes had been those of a child. Appropriately, perhaps, the first items I had chosen were photographs of me and Laure as children, posing in pinafores in a photographer’s studio. There was a picture of Laure on her wedding day. My father had never known her, but at least now he would see what a beauty his second daughter had been. The remaining photograph was of me receiving my Arts diploma from McGill.
In addition to family photographs I had packed the textbook by William Howlett containing my chapter on congenital heart defects. This he would also appreciate — his own daughter working for the man he once had mentored. I had also selected other academic papers I’d written, for the father of my memory had delighted in science and research. There were pamphlets announcing talks I had given at Harvard and Johns Hopkins and newspaper clippings reporting them. There were also articles on the museum and a flattering profile of my work at McGill in The Gazette.
Accompanying these items in a separate file folder was my first publication. I wanted to present this and the drawing by Jakob Hertzlich as special gifts to him. They both concerned Cor biatriatrum triloculare, the three-chambered heart with the little pocket compensating for the absent ventricle supposedly discovered by my father in 1872.
Several other three-chambered hearts with the compensatory pocket had been discovered after 1872, but the one at McGill was the first. In the article I had floated the term “the Bourret anomaly,” which I had hoped would please him as much as it pleased me.
Now of course I blushed to read what I had written. The heart was bound up in my father’s history, but differently from the way I had imagined. If what William Howlett had confessed were true his link with that heart was the last thing my father would want to be reminded of.
Then again he might be gratified to see the alibi he’d presented so many years ago corroborated by me in a reputable medical journal. I repacked it and Jakob’s drawing with the other items in the bag. When I reached 27 rue de Verel I would decide what to do with them, not before. It was best to be prepared for anything.
There was one possibility that I could not envisage — that my father might simply not open the door. William Howlett had implied this could happen, but I did not accept it. Shame had kept my father away from me all these years, I was sure of it. What man wouldn’t want to see his child — a child who cared so much she had crossed the Atlantic in midwinter to be with him? How could he not be pleased to learn she had recreated herself in his image, building a career that mirrored his own?
I slept better that night than I had in weeks. When I emerged from my room the following day full of hope and eagerness it was nearly ten o’clock. The innkeeper was at his bar, wiping glasses with a towel. He was a good-natured sort, with the red and bumpy nose of a brandy drinker. I guessed my red-nosed host was a few years younger than I, in his early forties. He invited me to sit down and his wife Eugenie soon came in with bread and a bowl of milky coffee.
“Eugenie says you are looking for Dr. Bourret,” he said as I started to eat.
I nodded. The bread was very fresh. I spread it with sweet butter and a delicious plum compote. As I ate the innkeeper entertained me with talk. Apparently my father had been a regular at the inn until quite recently. He had health problems now, the innkeeper said, but for years he had dropped by a couple of times a week. His work made him well-known to the townspeople. In fact, the innkeeper added proudly, Bourret had assisted at his own birth. “I was a breech baby, born ass-backward as the doctor never fails to remind me.” He winked and laughed.
So my father took a drink now and then with his neighbours. He had a sense of humour. The innkeeper had no idea what nuggets he was offering me. Honoré Bourret had become a country doctor, the kind he would once have disdained, contenting himself to deliver babies and nurse them through the ordinary maladies of childhood.
“Does he live alone?” I asked, draining my bowl. The bartender looked over at his wife then picked up a new glass. “Depends on what you mean by that word.”
“Does he have a wife?”
The bartender laughed. “He’s not exactly the marrying type, although women certainly like him.”
His wife shifted beside me. She had lingered in the bar to listen to our conversation. “This is his business, Gilles, not ours.”
“You are right, my dear.” He turned to me. “She is my conscience, dear Eugenie. But it hurts no one, least of all Dr. Bourret, to say he has success with women.”
“But there is no wife?” I asked again.
“Many have tried,” laughed the innkeeper. “There is someone with him now, even at his age. Mind you he’s probably sitting on a fortune.”
His wife shook her head at him. “He was married once a long time ago. In England, if I remember.”
“England?” I said, startled.
“She’s right,” said the bartender. He happened to be reaching for another glass and didn’t notice my surprise. “I had forgotten that, but it’s true. He was born in England. It’s why he speaks in that peculiar way, with an accent and English turns of phrase. He had an English wife and child, but they died in a boating accident.” He paused to study me. “You are from England
too, are you not?”
I shook my head. “Canada,” I said, although my mind was still with the wife and child drowned in England. It could have happened, I supposed. There were plenty of years in his life unaccounted for — half a century. But then I remembered that my father had been here in Calais over forty years ago, overseeing the innkeeper’s ass-backwards birth. That didn’t leave much time for a romantic interlude across the Channel, especially one producing a new child. Perhaps England was a fabrication, “une fausse piste,” as they called it here. The drownings might be an allusion to things that had happened in an entirely different place and time.
“Canada,” the bartender repeated thoughtfully. “But what are you to him, if I may ask, a relative? A friend?” He was observing me closely, rubbing the glass.
“A colleague,” I said quickly. “Our connection is professional.” It was partially true and I was not about to divulge anything more to them or to anyone else until I had spoken with my father.
Before I left the innkeeper drew me a map. Penmanship was not his strongest suit, and even before I left the inn I foresaw trouble. He apologized for the mess of lines but kept insisting it wouldn’t be hard to decipher. The old town was small, he said. I knew this to be true. Calais was a walled medieval city surrounded by moats and canals. “Ce n’est pas compliqué,” he kept assuring me, his maze of chicken scratches suggesting just the opposite.
Initially the map led me through Place d’Armes with its wide-open space and watchtower dating back to the thirteenth century. But soon the streets grew increasingly intertwined. The freezing rain of the previous day had stopped, but the temperature was still cold; the cobblestones were sheathed in ice. I hadn’t walked for ten minutes when I slipped and fell, crushing the bag full of things for my father. I sat on the curb and looked through it, ensuring the papers and photographs were undamaged.
The smell of fish was stronger here than in the main square. The gutters were full of refuse that looked like it had been there long before winter began. I resumed my walk. Following the innkeeper’s chicken scratches I turned left, then right, as I thought the map indicated. Then I turned right again. In Calais, like in the old sections of Montreal, street names were nailed to exterior walls. The one directly in front of me was nowhere on my map.
There was not a soul in sight. No shops, no cafés, no signs of life. Stevedores and sailors lived in this quartier, and for them the day before New Year’s was certainly a day of rest. They were probably sleeping, or perhaps the stillness suggested something more devastating and sad.
I walked down a deserted street, picked at random this time, following instinct instead of the map, which was not only unreliable but smudged after my fall. My boots slapped the cobblestones, creating an echo that gave me the sensation of being followed. I looked back over my shoulder until I realized that I myself was making the sound. A small white sign was screwed into a stone building in front of me, but again the street name meant nothing to me. I walked on, turning this way and that, abandoning myself to the feeling of being utterly lost.
The cold that had settled over this northern French city was bitter, unlike the cold of Montreal. When I had left that city I’d had to cover my face, and even then it had been hard to inhale. Frost had coated my eyelashes and exposed locks of hair. Calais, in contrast, had seemed warm when I arrived. Gradually, however, the damp had wormed its way inside my clothes. The town was built on a marsh; I was chilled to the bone.
Another street name was nailed into the wall of a building in front of me, but the lenses of my glasses had fogged and I couldn’t make it out right away. I removed them for a quick rub and it was then that I discerned the “V.” A few steps more and I was able to read the magic words. I stopped, shut my eyes and took a deep breath. I had arrived, walking in circles through the frozen streets with only a makeshift map and my instincts as guides. I rechecked the map one last time for the address. Rue de Verel, 27. The bartender had written the last digit the French way, like a crooked cross.
It was one of the bigger houses on the street, but even so it looked much more forlorn than I’d expected. The grey facade was almost indistinguishable in colour from the sky. Bars lined the lower windows. This was common in Calais, but it made the house seem guarded and suspicious.
There were no boards for pedestrians to walk on, just a strip of mud beside the cobblestones with boot prints frozen in it. I made my way to my father’s gate. A small front garden had been prepared for the winter, its bushes tied in burlap and string. I imagined Honoré Bourret attending to these details. By the looks of it he was a meticulous man.
The woman who came to the door was younger than I, although not by much, dressed casually in crocheted slippers and an old skirt. Her hair was a burnt orange colour with grey showing at the part line and temples. Her face was not friendly.
“I am looking for Dr. Bourret,” I said in French.
“Il ne travaille plus,” she said. Without even inquiring as to my needs she directed me to another physician, someone called Babin, who had apparently bought my father’s practice. His office was several streets to the south, she explained, but it was sure to be closed for the holidays.
I shook my head and told her I had not come for medical help. It was cold at the door. She hooked a slippered foot around her standing leg and folded her arms, waiting for me to say more.
“I need to see the doctor,” I said again. “My reasons are personal.”
This last remark made her angry. She had a square jaw, which she thrust out at me now, although frankly I couldn’t have looked like much of a threat. I had deduced she was my father’s companion — la femme qui n’était pas sa femme. Her attitude certainly made it clear that she wasn’t a cook or a housekeeper.
To put her at ease I said I was a colleague. “We knew each other long ago.”
We were both freezing by this time, so she allowed me inside while she went down the hall to announce me to Dr. Bourret. “I promise you nothing,” she tossed over her shoulder as she left. “He seldom receives visitors.”
The house was dark and smaller than it seemed from the outside. Its few windows were narrow, more suitable for a military fort than a home. The walls were painted white, which brightened it a little, and the gas lamps were lit, but the atmosphere was generally dreary.
The orange-haired woman eventually returned and led me to a living room at the back of the house. Now that the door was shut, closing off the salty smell of the sea, other odours took over. My hostess, I soon noticed, smelled of alcohol. We walked wordlessly to a den. Inside this room my father was sitting on a couch with his legs up, wrapped in a rug. He didn’t get up when I walked in, just turned to me and squinted. And what a shock that gave me, for the face he turned in my direction was nothing like the one I’d held for years inside me. His upper lip was shaved clean. His hair was completely white. He still had a quantity of it. He was wearing glasses with lenses so thick they magnified his eyes to twice their normal size, making him look at once angry and amazed.
I stood in the doorway staring until finally he called me inside. “You will excuse me if I do not rise,” he said in a French that was clearly not local. “My joints are painful with the wet weather.” He motioned me forward. “Enter,” he said. “Come into the light where I can see you.”
The request surprised me for I was already in the light at a distance of only five feet. The orange-haired woman gave me a push. “Go on,” she whispered. “His eyes are bad. You have to go right up close.”
“I can hear you,” said the old man. “My eyes may be weak but there is nothing wrong with my ears.” He took off his glasses to reveal pupils the colour of milk. “I can’t even read the papers now,” he said, folding up an old copy of Le Monde and sticking it between his body and a cushion. “Solange has to read me the news.” He motioned with his hands again. “Come closer! You are a blur!”
I had to walk right up to the couch. I felt like a little girl about to receive either a
slap or a kiss. He stared for some time then finally looked away. “No,” he said, as if answering a question. “I have never laid eyes on you.”
A brandy bottle sat on a low table with two glasses. The old man must have seen where I was looking for he started chuckling. “I guess I must offer you a drink. We were toasting the end of this particularly awful year. You will join us?” He held up a glass for me. “I’ve always felt it’s more important to bury the old year with a little pomp than to throw a party for the new one.” He pointed to a chair opposite his couch where he wanted me to sit. “Now tell me who you are. You say that we have met.”
He filled three glasses, handing one to me and another to Solange, who was standing nearby. “Come, my dear,” he said. “Help me welcome our guest.” He patted the free end of the couch and she sat down, reminding me of a tabby curling at its master’s feet.
“It was years ago,” I said. “I was just a child.” These were my first words to him, and I spoke them in English. Surprise registered on his face that I was not French.
He sat forward, trying to bring me into focus. For a moment he dropped his casual air. He turned on Solange. “I thought you said she was a colleague.”
Solange shrugged. “It’s what she said.”
“I did say that,” I said in French. I didn’t want to be the cause of a fight, and I certainly didn’t want to turn Solange into any more of an enemy to me than she already was. “I am a colleague now, a doctor like you.”
“You speak in riddles,” said my father. He was still looking in my direction, but the cloudy lenses made it difficult to know exactly what he was seeing. “You are English?”
I nodded.
“And a doctor.”
I nodded again.
“And where did you say we met?”
I steeled myself, half-expecting the floor to split open. “In Montreal.”
The Heart Specialist Page 27
