Collected Stories

The old church stood just outside the village on the rue des Chiens, the same street where they had found a house to rent. “We’ve installed ourselves in a cheap stone house on Dog Street.” Hélène’s mother had written this in a cheerful letter to a friend back home, as though having an inelegant address gave them an unconquerable ascendancy over the difficulties the little stone house presented. There it stood, surrounded by drenched shrubbery, a dragging lace of rain falling from the corners of the steep roof. The landlord, a scowling, silent widower with three teeth in his head, lived in the basement, and his presence cast a spell of restraint over them so that they tiptoed about the house, his house, in bedroom slippers and spoke to each other in hushed formal voices, more like a pair of elderly sisters than a mother and daughter. The bathroom stank despite the minty blue deodorizer Hélène had bought and attached to the wall, and the kitchen was damp and without cupboards. The two armchairs in the living room were covered with ancient, oily tapestry cloth, badly frayed. In the morning her mother made coffee, carried it to one of these repellent chairs and sat down with her notebooks. There she spent her time, scarcely getting up and looking out at the sea all day. Hélène knew without asking that the poems were not coming easily.

By good fortune the Canadian government had seen fit to award her mother a sum of money so that she could come to France for a year in order to write poetry. She had long desired—and this was explained at great length in the application—to touch the soil where her ancestral roots lay. (But these roots, she now admitted to Hélène in one of their long whispered talks, were more deeply buried than she had thought. Her forebears had gone to Canada a long time ago, first to Quebec, then making their way to Manitoba.) And she was not entirely certain which region of France they had come from, though it was generally believed to have been either Brittany or Normandy. Now she was here, breathing French air, eating French bread, drinking bitter black coffee and taking weekend walks on the wild wetted path that went along the coast, but what really was the use of this? What had she expected? For the so-called roots to rise up and embrace her?

It seemed to Hélène that her mother had childish notions about the magic of places. A field of oats was a field of oats. The blackberries they’d found along the coast path had the same beaded precision as those at home. Her mother had a way of making too much of things, always seeing secondary meanings, things that weren’t really there, and her eyes watered embarrassingly when she spoke of these deeper meanings. It was infantile, the way she went on and on about the fond of human experience. What was the fond but carrying home the groceries, trying to keep warm in the drafty stone house, walking down the dark road in the morning to school, where the other girls waited for her, admiring her warm wool sweaters and asking her how her mother, the poet, was doing.

Recently Hélène’s mother, as if to make up for the lack of poems, had latched with fevered intensity on to particles of local lore, prising them out of Michelin guides and storing them up in notebooks—not the same notebooks the poems went into, but pale green spiral-bound books with squared-off pages, notebooks (meant for young school children) that she bought in the village at the Maison de la Presse. In one of these notebooks, she had recorded:

There are two legends surrounding the founding of St. Quay, stories that contain similar elements but that occupy different sides of a coin. In the “good” story, a fourth-century Irish saint called St. Quay arrives in a stone boat to bring Christianity to the wild Breton coast. A bird flies ahead to tell the villagers of his imminent arrival, and the women (why just women?) joyfully run to the shore to greet him, bringing with them armloads of flowers and calling “St. Quay, St. Quay,” guiding the boat to safety with their cries.

In the second version, the “bad” version, the same bird arrives to say that a stranger is approaching in a stone boat. The women (women again!) of the village are suspicious and hostile, and they run to the shore with rough stalks of gorse in their hands which they brandish ferociously, all the time crying, “Quay, quay,” which means in old Gaelic, “Away, away.”

Her mother asked Hélène one day which version she preferred, but before Hélène could decide, she herself said, “I think the second version must be true.” Then she qualified. “Not true, of course, not in a real sense, but containing the elements, the fond of truth.”

“Why?” Hélène asked. She saw the shine on her mother’s face and felt an obligation to keep it there. “Why not the first version?”

“It’s a matter of perspective,” her mother said. “It’s just where I am now. In my life, I mean. I can believe certain things but not others.”

Because of the way she said this, and the way she squeezed her eyes shut, Hélène knew her mother was thinking about Roger, the man in Winnipeg she was in love with. She had been in love before, several times. Love, or something like it, was always happening to her.

But now something had happened to Hélène: she was locked inside a church, chosen somehow, the way characters in stories are chosen. The thought gave her a wavelet of happiness. And a flash of guilty heat. She should not have entered the door; it should not have been unlocked, and she should not be standing here—but she was. And what could she do about it—nothing. The feeling of powerlessness made her calm and almost sleepy. She looked about in the darkness for a place to sit down. There was nothing—no pews, no chairs, only the stone floor.

She tried the door again. The handle was heavy and made of some dull metal that filled her hand. She set her school bag on the floor and tried turning the handle and pushing on the door at the same time, leaning her shoulder into the wood. Then she pulled the door toward her, rattled it sharply and pushed it out again.

“Open,” she said out loud, and heard a partial echo float to the roof. It contained, surprisingly, the half-bright tone of triumph.

“I’m fourteen years old and locked in a French church.” These words slid out like a text she had been asked to read aloud. Calm sounds surrounded by their own well of calm; this was a fact. It was no more and no less than what had happened.

Perhaps there was another door. She began to look around. The windows, high up along the length of the church, let in soft arches of webbed light, but the light was fading fast. It was almost five o’clock and would be dark, she knew, in half an hour. Her mother would be waiting at home, the kitchen light on already, something started for supper.

High overhead was a dense, gray collision of dark beams and stone arches, and the arches were joined in such a way that curving shadows were formed, each of them like the quarter slice out of a circle. Hélène had made such curves with her pencil and compass under the direction of Sister Ste. Adolphe at the village school, and had been rewarded with a dainty-toothed smile and a low murmur, “Très, très bon.” Sister Ste. Adolphe gave her extra pencils, showed her every favor, favors that, instead of exciting envy among the girls, stirred their approval. Hélène was a foreigner and deserved privileges. It was just.

It occurred to Hélène that there must have been a reason for the church to be open. Perhaps there was a workman about, or perhaps Father Dominic himself had come to see that the church was safe and undisturbed during its long sleep between festivals.

“Hello,” she called out. “Bonjour. Is there anyone here?” She stood still, pulling her coat more closely around her and waiting for an answer.

While she waited, she imagined two versions of her death. She would be discovered in the spring when the doors were flung open for the festival. The crowds, rushing in with armloads of flowers, would discover what was left of her, a small skeleton, odorless, as neat on the floor as a heap of stacked kindling, and the school bag nearby with its books and pencils and notebooks would provide the necessary identification.

Or some miracle of transcendence might occur. This was a church, after all, and close by was the sea. She might be lifted aloft and found with long strands of seaweed in her hair; her skin would be bleached and preserved so that it gleamed with the lustre of certain kinds of shells, and her lips, caked with salt, would be parted to suggest a simple attitude of prayerfulness. (She and her mother, in their ten days of wandering, had visited the grave of an imbecile, a poor witless man who had lived as a hermit in the fourteenth century. It was said, a short time after his death and burial, that a villager had noticed a golden lily growing from the hermit’s grave, and when the body was exhumed it was discovered that the bulb of the plant was located in his throat, a testimonial to his true worth and a rebuke to those who had ignored him in his life.)

It occurred to Hélène that her mother would blame herself and not France. Lately, she was always saying, “One thing about France, the coffee has real flavor.” Or, “At least the French aren’t sentimental about animals,” or, “You can say one thing for France: things are expensive, but quality is high.” It seemed her mother was compelled to justify this place where she had deliberately settled down to being lonely and uncomfortable and unhappy.

It had all been a mistake, and now her mother, though she didn’t say it, longed for home and for Roger. “A man friend” is what she called Roger, saying this phrase with special emphasis as though it was an old joke with a low wattage of energy left in it. Roger loved her and wanted to marry her. They had known each other for two years. His first wife had left him. “He’s very bitter,” Hélène’s mother said, “and for someone like Roger, this can be a terrible blow, a great humiliation.”

He was a chef at the Convention Center in downtown Winnipeg. When he was a young man, he had been taken into the kitchens of the Ritz Carleton in Montreal, where he had learned sauces and pastries and salads. He had learned to make sculptures out of butter or lard or ice or sugar, and even—for it was an arduous apprenticeship, he tells Hélène—how to fold linen table napkins in twenty classic folds. Would she like a demonstration? She had said yes, despising herself, and Roger had instantly obliged, but he could remember only thirteen of the twenty ways. Now, at the Convention Center, he seldom does any cooking himself, but supervises the kitchen from a little office where he spends his time answering the phone and keeping track of grocery orders.

On Saturday nights he used to come to the apartment in St. Vital where Hélène and her mother lived, and there in the tiny kitchen he made them veal in cream or croquettes or a dish of steamed fish, pickerel with white mushrooms and pieces of green onion.

“Tell me what you like best,” he’d say to Hélène, “and next week I’ll try it out on you.”

Of course, he often stayed the night. He was astonishingly neat, never leaving so much as a toothbrush in the bathroom. On Sunday mornings he made them poached eggs on toast—ducks in their nests he called them. He had a trick with the eggs, lifting them from the simmering water with a spatula, then flipping them onto a clean, cotton tea towel, patting them dry, and then sliding them onto buttered triangles of toast—all this without breaking the yolks. He had learned to do this at the Ritz Carleton when he was a young man. “It would not have been acceptable,” he said, “to serve an egg that was wet.” He does it all very quickly and lightly, moving like a character in a speeded-up movie. The first time he did it for Hélène—she was only twelve at the time—she had clapped her hands, and now he’s made it into a ceremony, one of several that have unsettled the household.

“Come here, little duckie,” he says, flashing his spatula. “Turn yourself over like a good little duck for Hélène.” Hélène, when he said this, found it hard to look at her mother, who laughed loudly at this showmanship, her mouth wide and crooked.

Later, after Roger had left, there were a few minutes of tender questioning between them. Hélène’s mother, settling down on the plumped cushions, talked slowly, evenly, taking, it would seem, full measure of the delicate temperamental balance of girls in their early adolescence. About the disruption to the household, she was apologetic, saying, “This is only temporary.” And, saying with her eyes, “This is not how I planned things.” (“Shhh,” she said to Roger when he became too merry, when he was about to tell another joke or another story about his apprenticeship.) “How do you like Roger?” her mother asked her. Then, instead of waiting for an answer, her mother began to talk about Roger’s ex-wife, how vicious she had been, how she left him for another man.

“I hope I’m not barging in,” Roger said, if he dropped by in the middle of the week. He was always bringing presents, not just food, but jewelry, once an alarm clock, once a coat for her mother and a silk blouse for herself. (“I don’t know what girls like,” he’d said abjectly on this occasion. “I can take it back.”)

This is what made Hélène numb. She couldn’t say a word in reply, and her silence ignited a savage shame. What was the matter? The matter was that they were waiting for her. They were waiting for her to make up her mind, just as the girls in the schoolyard with their cartables and their regulation blouses wait for her to arrive in the dark mornings and bring some improbable substance into the cement schoolyard. “Tell us about Weenie-pegg. Tell us about the snow.”

It was growing very cold inside the church, but then even the churches they had visited in September had been cold. Hélène and her mother had carried cardigans. “You can never tell about the weather here,” her mother had said, puzzled. This was a point scored against France, a plus for Manitoba, where you at least knew what to expect.

And soon it would be dark. Frail moons of light pressed like mouths on the floor, though the walls themselves were darkly invisible. Hélène reached out and rubbed her hand along the rough surface. This was—she began to figure—this was a fourteenth-century church; twenty centuries take away fourteen—that left six; that meant this church was six hundred years old, walls that were planted by the side of a road called rue des Chiens in a village called St. Quay, which was hidden away in the hexagon that was France. And her body would not be found until spring.

O Mother of God, she said to herself, and rubbed at her hair. O Mother of Jesus.

She tried the door again, putting her ear to the wood to see if she could sound out the inner hardware. There was only a thickish sound of metal butting against wood and the severed resistance of moving parts. She was going to perish. Perish. At fourteen. The thought struck her that her mother would never get over this. She would go back home and tell Roger she couldn’t marry him. She would stop writing poems about landscapes that were “jawbone simple and picked clean by wind” and about the “glacé moon pinned like a brooch in the west.” She would sink into the fond, and her mouth would sag open—this was not how she had planned things. And whose fault was it?

By now the church was entirely dark, but at the far end the altar gleamed dully. It seemed a wonder to Hélène that she could summon interest in this faint light. What was it? There was no gold or ornamentation, only a wooden railing that had been polished or worn by use, and the last pale light lay trapped there on the smooth surface like a pool of summer water.

O Mother of God, she breathed, thinking of Sister Ste. Adolphe, her tiny teeth.

She ran her hand along its edge. There was something at one end. Altar candles. The light didn’t reach this far, but her hand felt them in the darkness, a branched candle holder, rising toward the center. She counted the tall candles with her fingers. Up they went like little stairs, one, two, three, four, five, six and then down again on the other side.

There might be matches, she thought, and fumbled at the base of the candle holder. Then she remembered she had some in her school bag. Her mother had asked her to stop at the tobagie for cigarettes and matches. (At home in St. Vital they had refused to sell cigarettes to minors, but here in France no one blinked an eye; a point for France.)

She felt her way back to where she had left the bag, rummaged for the matches, and then moved back along the wall to the candles. She managed to light them all, using only three matches, counting under her breath. The stillness of the flames seemed of her own creation, and a feeling of virtue struck her, a ridiculous steamroller. She thought how she would never again in her life be able to take virtue seriously.

Astonishing how much light twelve candles gave off. The stone church shrank in the light so that it seemed not a church at all, but a cheerful meeting room where any minute people might burst through the door and call out her name.

And, of course, that was what would happen, she realized. The lit-up church would attract someone’s notice. It was a black night, and rain was falling hard on the roof, but nevertheless someone—and soon—would pass by and see the light from the church. An immediate investigation would be in order. Father Dominic would be summoned at once.

This might take several minutes; he would have to find his overshoes, his umbrella, not to mention the key to the church. Then there would be the mixed confusion of embracing and scolding. How could you? Why on earth? Thank God in all his mercy.

Until then, there was a width of time she would enter and inhabit. There was nothing else she could do; it was laughable. All she had to do was stand here warming her hands in the heat of the twelve candles—how beautiful they were really!—and wait for rescue to come.

Purple Blooms

THERE IS A BOOK I LIKE by the Mexican poet Mario Valeso, who, by coincidence, lives here in this city and who, in the evening, sometimes strolls down this very street. The book is entitled Purple Blooms and it is said to resolve certain perplexing memories of the poet’s childhood. It is a work that is full of tact, yet it is tentative, off-balance, dark and truncated—and it is just this lack of finish that so moved me the first time I read it.

I gave a copy of the book to my friend Shana, who’s been “going through a bad time,” as she puts it. People who meet her are generally struck by her beauty. She’s young, well-off and in excellent health, yet she claims that the disconnectedness of life torments her. Everything makes her sad. Lilacs make her sad. Chopin makes her sad. The thought of rain falling in a turbulent and empty ocean makes her sad. But nothing makes her sadder than the collection of toby jugs that her mother, the film actress, left her in her will.

More than a hundred of these sturdy little creatures fill the shelves of her sunny apartment. I myself find it unnerving the way they glisten and grin and puff out their pottery cheeks as though oblivious to the silly pouring lip that deforms the tops of their heads. Knick-knacks, Shana calls them, willfully denying their value, but she refuses nevertheless to part with them, though I’ve given her the name of an auctioneer who would guarantee a fair price.

It could be said that she encourages her sadness. It could be demonstrated. On her glass-topped coffee table she keeps a large vase of lilacs and an alabaster bust of Chopin and, since last Saturday, my gift of Mario Valeso’s book Purple Blooms. The denseness, the compaction of the closed text and the assertive angle with which it rests on the table suggest to me that she has not yet opened its pages.

I have also given a copy to Edward. He is attractive, my Edward. I’ve spent a considerable number of hours staring at him, hoping his handsome features would grow less perfect, more of a match for my own. What does he see in me? (This is the question I ask myself—though I like to think I put it rhetorically.)

“Purple Blooms,” Edward murmured as he slipped the gift wrap off the book, and then he said it again—“Purple Blooms”—in that warm, sliding, beet-veined voice of his. His father, as everyone knows, sang tenor with the Mellotones in the late forties, and some say that Edward has inherited something of the color of his voice. Edward, of course, vehemently denies any such inheritance. When he hears old records of “Down by the Riverside” or “I’m Blue Turning Gray Over You,” he cannot imagine how he came to be the son of such a parent. The line of descent lacks distinction and reason, and Edward is a distinguished and reasoning man. He is also a man attentive to the least sexual breeze, and the minute he pronounced the words, “Purple Blooms,” I began worrying that he would find the poems not sensual enough for his liking.

“These poems are about the poet’s past,” I explained to Edward, rather disliking myself for the academic tone I was taking. “Valeso is attempting to make sense of certain curious family scenes that have lingered in his memory.”

Edward, wary of dark sublimities, examined the dust jacket. “It won’t bite you,” I said, joking. He placed the book in his briefcase and promised he would “look at it” on the weekend or perhaps on his summer holidays.

“If you’re not going to read it,” I said, testing him, “I’ll give it to someone else.”

For a minute we were pitched straight into one of those little arched silences that lean inward on their own symmetry as though no exterior force existed. Edward took my hand sweetly, then rubbed his thumb across the inside of my wrist, but I noticed he did not promise me anything, and that made me uneasy.

As always, when I’m uneasy, I go out and buy my mother a present. Sometimes I bring her roasted cashews or fresh fruit, but today I take her a copy of Purple Blooms. “A book?” she shouts. She has not read a book since she was a young girl.

Fat and full of fury, she stands most days by an upstairs window and spies on the world. What possible need does she have for books, she asks me. Life is all around her.

To be more truthful, life is all behind her. At eighteen she was crowned North America’s Turkey Queen at Ramona, California, and wore a dress that was made up entirely of turkey feathers. She has the dress still, though I’ve never laid eyes on it since she stores it in a fur vault in San Diego, once a year mailing off a twelve-dollar check for storage fees and saying, as she drops the envelope in the mailbox, “Well, so much for misspent youth.”

How I plead with her! Go to a movie, I say. Invite the neighbors in. Take a course in French conversation or gourmet cooking or music appreciation. A year ago she stopped the newspapers. When the picture tube went on the TV, she decided it wasn’t worth fixing. It seems nothing that’s happening in the world has any connection with the eighteen-year-old girl carried so splendidly through the streets of Ramona with a crown of dusky turkey feathers in her hair.

“What do I want with a book about flowers,” my mother growls. Her tone is rough, though she loves me dearly. I explain that the book is not about flowers (and at the same time imagine myself slyly trading on her innocent error at some future gathering of friends). “This poet,” I tell her, “is attempting to recall certain early scenes that bloomed mysteriously and darkly like flowers, and that he now wants to come to terms with.”

This is rather an earful for my mother. She pulls at her apron, looks frowningly at the ceiling, then out the window; this last I recognize as a signal that she wants me to leave, and I do.

Later that afternoon I find myself in the park. Almost everyone knows about the very fine little park at 16th and Ossington—a gem of a park with a wide gravel path and a sprightly round-headed magnolia and smooth painted benches by the side of a bowling green. A cool, quiet place to sit and read, but today it is filled with people.