Collected Stories. Carol Shields
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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