Letters

“Your friend has been informed. She understands,” he assured me in Canadian French, as he helped me into a chair — none too soon, for the sound of that richest, most masculine of voices, the dear dialect I’d first heard in Gertrude Stein’s house, undid my knees. “I urged her to have dinner with us, but she wanted to get back to Toronto. Charming woman. I quite approve.”

I am told we had good veal and better Moselle: André prefers whites with all his meats. I am told that I was not after all too gone in the head to protest the impossibility of our dining and conversing together as if no explanation, no justification were needed. I am told even that I waxed eloquent upon the outrageous supposition that his smile, his touch, the timbre of that voice, made me “his” again despite everything, as in the lyrics of a silly song. Where was our son? I’m told I demanded. What could possibly justify my being quite abandoned but never quite forsaken, my wounds kept always slightly open by those loving, heartless letters? And finally — I am told I asked — how was I to get home that night, when this absurd rendezvous was done and I’d regained my breath and strength?

What I did not question until later, to André’s own professed surprise, was his authenticity. Appearances and mannerisms are easily mimed: did I need no proof, after all those years, that he was he? Well, I didn’t; didn’t care (at the time) even to address so vertiginous a question. If, somewhile later, I began to wonder, it was because for the first time since our parting he had come to me in the role of himself: had he posed as another, I’d never have doubted at all.

We stayed at the Wolpert until Monday, scarcely leaving André’s room except for meals. He was obliged, as I stood about dazed, to undress me himself. When he first entered me — after so many years, so many odd others — I became hysterical. From Kitchener he took me back to Castines Hundred, where I enjoyed something of a nervous collapse. It was as if for twenty-five years I had been holding my breath, or an unnatural pose, and could now “let go,” but had forgot how. It was as if — but I can’t describe what it was as if. Except to say that for André it was as if our quarter-century separation had been a month’s business trip: a regrettable bother, but not uninteresting, and happily done with. Good to be back, and, let’s see, what had we been discussing?

Sedatives helped, prescribed by the Castines’ doctor. Arrangements were made at the university to reschedule my lectures after my recovery. André too, I learned (now Baron Castine since his grandfather’s death), had been briefly married — a mere dozen years or so, as it were to mark time “till my own marriage had run its course”—and had sired “one or two more children,” delightful youngsters, I’d love them, off in boarding schools just then, pity. Had I truly borne no more since ours? Dommage. Now that chap, our Henri, yes: chip off the old block, he: more his grandfather’s son, or his “uncle’s,” than his father’s: at twenty-six a more promising director of the script of History than either of them at his age, busy redoing what he André had spent half a lifetime undoing. Crying shame he wasn’t at Castines Hundred then and there: it was high time we approached the question of revealing to him his actual parentage…

Tranquillisers. And where might the lad be? Ah, he André had hoped against hope that I might have had some word from him: the boy was at the age when certain of his predecessors had revised their opinion of their parents, and was skilful enough to discover them for himself. Last André had heard, Henri was underground in Quebec somewhere, playing Grandpère’s nasty tricks on the Separatists, who took him for their own. So at least he’d given out. Before that he’d been working either with or against the man he understood to be his father, down in Washington. But his track had been lost, just when André much desired to find it. Of this, more when I was stronger, and of his own activities as well: a little bibliography of “historical corners turned” that he was impatient to lay before me, “like the love poems they also are.”

He had of course followed with close interest my own career: he commended my articles on Mme de Staël (whom however he advised me now to put behind) and my patience with my late husband Jeffrey’s later adulteries. He informed me, in case I should be interested, that Jeffrey had been infertile if not quite impotent after the 1940’s, but had honoured paternity claims against him rather than acknowledge his infirmity. My essay on Héloïse’s letters to Peter Abelard, he said, had been heartbreakingly sympathetic, yet dignified and strong as poor Héloïse herself. Had I read any good books lately?