He had taken great care to stay close behind the two girls. For one thing, he had not yet had the answer to “Are you happy?” He heard now, “I am twenty-one years old and I have not succeeded…” and then he was wrenched out of the queue. Pushing back, pretending to be armored against unknown forces, like his wife, he heard someone insult him and smiled uncomprehendingly. No one knew how much he understood — except for his wife. It was as though he listened to stones, or snow, or trees speaking. “…even though we went to a restaurant and I paid for his dinner,” said the same girl, who had not even looked round, and for whom the Colonel had no existence. “The next night he came to the door very late. My parents were in bed. He had come from some stuffy place — his coat stank. But he looked clean and important. He always does. We went into the kitchen. He said he had come up because he cared and could not spend an evening without seeing me, and then he said he had no money, or had lost his money somewhere. I did not want my mother to hear. I said, ‘Now I know why you came to see me.’ I gave him money — how could I refuse? He knows we keep it in the same drawer as the knives and forks. He could have helped himself, but instead he was careful not to look at the drawer at all. When he wants to show tenderness, he presses his face to my cheek, his lips as quiet as his forehead — it is like being embraced by a dead animal. I was ashamed to think he knew I would always be there waiting. He thinks he can come in whenever he sees a light from the street. I have no advantage from my loyalty, only disadvantages.”
Her friend seemed to be meditating deeply. “If you are not happy, it might be your fault,” she said.
The cloakroom attendant flung first the girls’ coats and woollen caps on the counter, and then their boots, which had been stored in numbered cubbyholes underneath, and it was the Colonel’s turn to give up plastic tokens in exchange for his wife’s old fur-lined cloak, Amabel’s inadequate jacket, his own overcoat — but of course the girls were lost, and he would never see them again. What nagged at him was that disgraceful man. Oh, he could imagine him well enough: an elegant black marketeer, speaking five languages, wearing a sable hat, following tourists in the snow, offering icons in exchange for hard currency. It would explain the watch and perhaps even the chocolates and oranges. “His coat stank” and “he looked clean and important” were typically feminine contradictions, of unequal value. He thought he saw the girls a moment later, but they may have been two like them, leaning on a wall, holding each other’s coats as they tugged their boots on; then he saw them laughing, collapsed in each other’s arms. This is unusual, he told himself, for when do people laugh in public anywhere in the north — not only in this sullen city? He thought, as though suddenly superior to the person he had been only a minute ago, what an iron thing it would be never to regret one’s losses.
His wife and Amabel looked too alert, as if they had been discussing him and would now pretend to talk about something else.
“That didn’t take long,” remarked Mrs. Plummer, meaning to say that it had. With overwhelming directness she said, “The year still has an hour to run, so Amabel tells me, and so we had better take her home with us for a drink.”
“Only an hour left to change the year ahead,” said Amabel without tact.
The Colonel knew that the city was swept by a Siberian blizzard and that their taxi would be nowhere in sight. But outside he saw only the dust of snow sifting past streetlights. The wind had fallen; and their driver was waiting exactly where he had promised. Colonel Plummer helped Amabel down the icy steps of the opera house, then went back for his wife. Cutting off a possible question, she said, “I can make a bed for her somewhere.”
Wait, he said silently, looking at all the strangers disappearing in the last hour of the year. Come back, he said to the girls. Who are you? Who was the man?
Amabel’s little nose was white with cold. Though this was not her turn to speak, Mrs. Plummer glanced down at her guest, who could not yet hear, saying, “‘He is not glad that he is going home, nor sorry that he has not had time to see the city….’”
“It’s ‘the sights of the city,’ I think,” said the Colonel. “I’ll look it up.” He realized he was not losing his memory after all. His breath came and went as if he were still very young. He took Amabel’s arm and felt her shiver, though she did not complain about the weather and had her usual hopeful smile ready in case he chose to look. Hilarity is happiness, he thought, sadly, remembering those two others. Is it?
Mrs. Plummer took her turn by remarking, “Used to read the same books,” to no one in particular.
Without another word, the Plummers climbed into the taxi and drove with Amabel back to the heart of their isolation, where there was no room for a third person; but the third person knew nothing about this, and so for Amabel the year was saved.
THE DOCTOR
WHO CAN REMEMBER now a picture called The Doctor? From 1891, when the original was painted, to the middle of the Depression, when it finally went out of style, reproductions of this work flowed into every crevice and corner of North America and the British Empire, swamping continents. Not even The Angelus supplied as rich a mixture of art and lesson. The two people in The Angelus are there to tell us clearly that the meek inherit nothing but seem not to mind; in The Doctor a cast of four enacts a more complex statement of Christian submission or Christian pessimism, depending on the beholder: God’s Will is manifest in a dying child, Helpless Materialism in a baffled physician, and Afflicted Humanity in the stricken parents. The parable is set in a spotless cottage; the child’s bed, composed of three chairs, is out of a doll’s house. In much of the world — the world as it was, so much smaller than now — two full generations were raised with the monochrome promise that existence is insoluble, tragedy static, poverty endearing, and heavenly justice a total mystery.
It must have come as a shock to overseas visitors when they discovered The Doctor incarnated as an oil painting in the Tate Gallery in London, in the company of other Victorian miseries entitled Hopeless Dawn and The Last Day in the Old Home. The Doctor had not been divinely inspired and distributed to chasten us after all, but was the work of someone called Sir Luke Fildes — nineteenth-century rationalist and atheist, for all anyone knew. Perhaps it was simply a scene from a three-decker novel, even a joke. In museum surroundings — classified, ticketed — The Doctor conveyed a new instruction: Death is sentimental, art is pretense.
Some people had always hated The Doctor. My father, for one. He said, “You surely don’t want that thing in your room.”
The argument (it became one) took place in Montreal, in a house that died long ago without leaving even a ghost. He was in his twenties, to match the century. I had been around about the length of your average major war. I had my way but do not remember how; neither tears nor temper ever worked. What probably won out was his wish to be agreeable to Dr. Chauchard, the pediatrician who had given me the engraving. My father seemed to like Chauchard, as he did most people — just well enough — while my mother, who carried an uncritical allegiance from person to person, belief to belief, had recently declared Chauchard to be mentally, morally, and spiritually without fault.
Dr. Chauchard must have been in his thirties then, but he seemed to me timeless, like God the Father. When he took the engraving down from the wall of his office, I understood him to be offering me a portrait of himself. My mother at first refused it, thinking I had asked; he assured her I had not, that he had merely been struck by my expression when I looked at the ailing child. “C’est une sensible,” he said — an appraisal my mother dismissed by saying I was as tough as a boot, which I truly believe to have been her opinion.