NEW YEAR’S EVE
On New Year’s Eve the Plummers took Amabel to the opera.
“Whatever happens tonight happens every day for a year,” said Amabel, feeling secure because she had a Plummer on either side.
Colonel Plummer’s car had broken down that afternoon; he had got his wife and their guest punctually to the Bolshoi Theater, through a storm, in a bootleg taxi. Now he discovered from his program that the opera announced was neither of those they had been promised.
His wife leaned across Amabel and said, “Well, which is it?” She could not read any Russian and would not try.
She must have known it would take him minutes to answer, for she sat back, settled a width of gauzy old shawl on her neck, and began telling Amabel the relative sizes of the Bolshoi and some concert hall in Vancouver the girl had never heard of. Then, because it was the Colonel’s turn to speak, she shut her eyes and waited for the overture.
The Colonel was gazing at the program and putting off the moment when he would have to say that it was Ivan Susanin, a third choice no one had so much as hinted at. He wanted to convey that he was sorry and that the change was not his fault. He took bearings: He was surrounded by women. To his left sat the guest, who mewed like a kitten, who had been a friend of his daughter’s, and whose name he could not remember. On the right, near the aisle, two quiet unknown girls were eating fruit and chocolates. These two smelled of oranges; of clothes worn a long time in winter; of light recent sweat; of women’s hair. Their arms were large and bare. When the girl closest to him moved slightly, he saw a man’s foreign wristwatch. He wondered who she was, and how the watch had come to her, but he had been here two years now — long enough to know he would never be answered. He also wondered if the girls were as shabby as his guest found everyone in Moscow. His way of seeing women was not concerned with that sort of evidence: Shoes were shoes, a frock was a frock.
The girls took no notice of the Colonel. He was invisible to them, wiped out of being by a curtain pulled over the inner eye.
He felt his guest’s silence, then his wife’s. The visitor’s profile was a kitten’s, to match her voice. She was twenty-two, which his Catherine would never be. Her gold dress, packed for improbable gala evenings, seemed the size of a bathing suit. She was divorcing someone, or someone in Canada had left her — he remembered that, but not her name.
He moved an inch or two to the left and muttered, “It’s Ivan.”
“What?” cried his wife. “What did you say?”
In the old days, before their Catherine had died, when the Colonel’s wife was still talking to him, he had tried to hush her in public places sometimes, and so the habit of loudness had taken hold.
“It isn’t Boris. It isn’t Igor. It’s Ivan. They must both have had sore throats.”
“Oh, well, bugger it,” said his wife.
Amabel supposed that the Colonel’s wife had grown peculiar through having lived so many years in foreign parts. Having no one to speak to, she conversed alone. Half of Mrs. Plummer’s character was quite coarse, though a finer Mrs. Plummer somehow kept order. Low-minded Mrs. Plummer chatted amiably and aloud with her high-minded twin — far more pleasantly than the whole of Mrs. Plummer ever talked to anybody.
“Serves you right,” she said.
Amabel gave a little jump. She wondered if Mrs. Plummer’s remark had anything to do with the opera. She turned her head cautiously. Mrs. Plummer had again closed her eyes.
The persistence of memory determines what each day of the year will be like, the Colonel’s wife decided. Not what happens on New Year’s Eve. This morning I was in Moscow; between the curtains snow was falling. The day had no color. It might have been late afternoon. Then the smell of toast came into my room and I was back in my mother’s dining room in Victoria, with the gros-point chairs and the framed embroidered grace on the wall. A little girl I had been ordered to play with kicked the baseboard, waiting for us to finish our breakfast. A devilish little boy, Hume something, was on my mind. I was already attracted to devils; I believed in their powers. My mother’s incompetence about choosing friends for me shaped my life, because that child, who kicked the baseboard and left marks on the paint …
When she and her husband had still been speaking, this was how Frances Plummer had talked. She had offered him hours of reminiscence, and the long personal thoughts that lead to quarrels. In those days red wine had made her aggressive, whiskey made him vague.
Not only vague, she corrected; stubborn too. Speak? said one half of Mrs. Plummer to the other. Did we speak? We yelled!
The quiet twin demanded a fairer portrait of the past, for she had no memory.
Oh, he was a shuffler, back and forth between wife and mistress, said the virago, who had forgotten nothing. He’d desert one and then leave the other — flag to flag, false convert, double agent, reason why a number of women had long, hilly conversations, like the view from a train — monotonous, finally. That was the view a minute ago, you’d say. Yes, but look now.
The virago declared him incompetent; said he had shuffled from embassy to embassy as well, pushed along by a staunch ability to retain languages, an untiring recollection of military history and wars nobody cared about. What did he take with him? His wife, for one thing. At least she was here, tonight, at the opera. Each time they changed countries he supervised the packing of a portrait of his mother, wearing white, painted when she was seventeen. He had nothing of Catherine’s: When Catherine died, Mrs. Plummer gave away her clothes and her books, and had her little dog put to sleep.
How did it happen? In what order? said calm Mrs. Plummer. Try and think it in order. He shuffled away one Easter; came shuffling back; and Catherine died. It is useless to say “Serves you right,” for whatever served him served you.
The overture told Amabel nothing, and by the end of the first act she still did not know the name of the opera or understand what it was about. Earlier in the day the Colonel had said, “There is some uncertainty — sore throats here and there. The car, now — you can see what has happened. It doesn’t start. If our taxi should fail us, and isn’t really a taxi, we might arrive at the Bolshoi too late for me to do anything much in the way of explaining. But you can easily figure it out for yourself.” His mind cleared; his face lightened. “If you happen to see Tartar dances, then you will know it is Igor. Otherwise it is Boris.”
The instant the lights rose, Amabel thrust her program at him and said, “What does that mean?”
“Why, Ivan. It’s Ivan.”
“There are two words, aren’t there?”
“Yes. What’s-His-Name had a sore throat, d’you see? We knew it might all be changed at any moment. It was clever of them to get these printed in time.”
Mrs. Plummer, who looked like the Red Queen sometimes, said, “A life for the tsar,” meanwhile staring straight ahead of her.
“Used to be, used to be,” said the Colonel, and he smiled at Amabel, as if to say to her, “Now you know.”
The Plummers did not go out between acts. They never smoked, were seldom thirsty or hungry, and they hated crowds. Amabel stood and stretched so that the Russians could appreciate her hair, her waist, her thin arms, and, for those lucky enough to glimpse them, her thighs. After a moment or two Mrs. Plummer thought the Russians had appreciated Amabel enough, and she said very loudly, “You might be more comfortable sitting down.”