Mme Proust and the Kosher Kitchen (38 page)

After he left, I retreated to the drawing room and closed the doors, thinking Maire would wake soon enough and would be able to slip out of the house unnoticed and thus be spared any embarrassment. Luckily, Jean was out on errands. She must have managed it, for when Marcel rose at three there was no sign of her.

I wonder if I need to speak to her. She must surely understand that Marcel will never make any girl a husband. He is far too ill and the hours he keeps are impossible for me and the servants, let alone a wife.

I
AM NOT ASLEEP.
I am lying on the narrow pull-out bed in Max’s studio apartment, staring wide-eyed into the dark. I can hear his even breathing, just across the room from me—the place is so small I could almost reach across the gap between the couch where I lie and his bed, and touch him with my hand. I long for him to be awake, for him to reach out and touch me.

This night, we have attended a party in a small street on the Plateau Mont Royal, Montreal’s neighbourhood of intellectuals and immigrants. I am flattered to have been included, pleased Max would want to share his friends with me, and my joy has made me talkative all evening. When we emerge after midnight, part of a laughing group that plans to move downtown to a bar, an early snow is falling, with small flakes sparkling in the light of the street lamps. It must have been snowing for some time, for the world that was bare and brown when we entered the party has disappeared. Max stops me as we step off the stairs that run up the outside of the house and, to quieten my movement towards the others who are now several steps ahead out on the street, takes my mittened hand.

“Look at the railing,” he says, indicating the wrought-iron banisters that follow the outdoor staircase up to the second-floor flat that we have just left. “Two hours ago, it was just metal, but look at it now.” Indeed, there is a growing, vertical coat of snow perched all the way up it, so that its hard, narrow, and reliable diagonal line is transformed into a soft yet perilous object of quiet impossible dimensions.

He looks expansively up at the sky, and smiles.

“Snow, it’s like falling in love,” he says. “Makes you see the whole world differently.”

We pull each other forward to catch up with our companions, and the moment passes, but I clasp this little pearl of
poetry to me, treasuring its beauty, admiring its sheen, and trying to read an announcement into its metaphor.

I have waited, anticipating, longing, ever since the day when, following Max off the bus that leads down from the Plateau as it stops at the Place des Arts, I admire the hair on the back of his head and realize with a sudden, piercing emotion that I no longer love Max with the adolescent tremors and twinklings that have marked our friendship from the start, but with some newer, larger, less-sparkling feeling that seems to take hold of my soul.

During the previous school year, while, lonely and uncertain, I work away at my translation certificate during the week in Ottawa, and visit my comrades in Montreal every weekend, my friend Max has made me the gift of several other pearls. On an October day, playfully pursuing me through a park near his apartment, for we are late and I have urged him not to dawdle, he grabs a handful of the dried, fallen leaves that sit in piles where the gardeners have raked them up, and stuffs them down the back of my coat, as though needing some excuse to put his arms about me, just as he did on the day I held the cat. Again, I delight in the moment, but cannot help noticing, four months later, when he repeats the identical game in the same place with a lump of crystalline snow balled up in his gloved hand, that nothing has changed in our friendship.

One morning, sitting in a deli eating bagels and scrambled eggs washed down with thin coffee, we talk to a child, a boy of three or four, who pops his head over the booth, ignoring his parents’ pleas to sit down. Max warms to him, speaks to him rationally, asking what he is eating for breakfast and whether he prefers syrup or jam on his pancakes. The boy holds his attention fully, and while the child occasionally
glances up to make sure he has secured my affection as well, Max ignores me, entering into this conversation with a gravity that might suggest this was a rare opportunity to consult a true philosopher as to the existence of God. When the child leaves, waving cheerfully at his new friend, Max turns to me and asks, “Do you want children?”

A chasm seems to open beneath my feet. No answer seems possible or right. I mumble something uncertain, noncommittal.

And now, lying on the pull-out bed in Max’s apartment—for it is my second year in Ottawa; I often do not tell my parents that I am in Montreal for the weekend, and go directly to stay with him—I cannot sleep. I have lain here often, a few feet away from his bed, and slept fully, but tonight my thoughts keep me awake, and grow increasingly dark as the dawn approaches. And here, in this particular moment of the small hours, I am given new vision, an adult perception of the matter, and know he does not love me nor will he ever. Gripped by my sense of both hopelessness and truth, I become determined, and think I will rise, dress, leave him a brief note—or perhaps not—and be gone, forever, never calling, ignoring his messages, until I am free of his image in my mind’s eye and the sound of his voice in my ear.

But instead a fitful slumber finally overtakes me on the spare bed, and I think that I hear his mother calling me to save her. She is trapped in a hole and her voice comes from faraway over the telephone line and yet she is also in the room with me.

I fall into a deeper, dreamless sleep and by the time I rise late the next morning I have forgotten my resolve. Our desultory friendship continues in this way until the following summer.

Marcel is impossible. We have spread the wedding goods in the library, so that Dick and I can make our last decisions before we present everything to Marthe, and I have lace and tapestries sitting out uncovered. I had told Marcel he must do his fumigations elsewhere for the duration, but yesterday afternoon found him in the library polluting the fine cloths with those foul powders. He insists the smoking of them helps but I wonder they are not just like the Trional, and become a crutch rather than a cure. I remonstrated with him, and he argued he could not possibly use his own room because Jean was seeing to the chimney, which has been smoking of late, and had wanted to get into the room as soon as he rose. I went and spoke to Jean who, of course, was perfectly happy to wait until after dinner—I do hope it is just some soot caught in the damper, for the last thing I need in the house at the moment is a chimney sweep.

I conducted Marcel back to his room but he was sulking horribly by this time, and when I tried to speak to him, he hissed at me that he did not wish to be embarrassed in front of the servants once again—the once again being his modifier, not mine. I just gave up and tried to air the library a bit.

We have decided to have the dinner for the men on the twenty-ninth, two weeks from now, on the night before the day before the civil marriage. I thought the Friday night might be more appropriate, just the night before and Dick’s last as a bachelor, but Adrien gently pointed out to me that if the boys all overindulge it would be difficult for Dick the next day. And for Marthe too.

Nice family dinner last night with just Georges and Emilie. He was singing the joys of conjugal life to Dick, which was sweet although not altogether accurate in his case. I had forgotten how we tried always to keep from the boys any word of his mistresses—that actress especially, who was not discreet. He handles it all with much more delicacy these days, which is what one requires of a husband. And I suppose after all these years Emilie does not care as much as she used to, although we have never shared our feelings on this matter. But I am sure Dick will be a loyal husband, and I am so happy to have one of them married at least. A grandchild is perhaps not too much to hope for before Adrien and I are that much older.

We finally have positive word from Mercure, but Marcel must now try and get the manuscript back from Ollendorff, who has been really infuriating with his slowness and indecision. It serves him right to find the project stolen out from underneath him. Publishers should be business people after all.

Marcel has now delivered the second part of his introduction to Constantin, who ensures him that it will be published in February, but he is glum about the whole thing, says translation is not real work at all, and angry at the disruptions of his brother’s wedding. I do not have the energy to remonstrate with him, although now that Mercure has agreed he must push ahead and finish. I only wish Bertrand or Antoine were here to
comfort him a bit, but I have written to the loyal Hahn asking that he might come from his Versailles retreat and see Marcel soon.

Only now risen from my bed to oversee Jean’s preparations for this evening. Thank heavens I do not need to be present. I feel exhausted when I should be joyful. I spent most of the week in bed with a cold, as did Marcel who is preparing for this evening with care. He believes that if he has all day tomorrow to rest and then Sunday again in bed, he should be able to assist at both the city hall on Saturday and the church on Monday. He tires so easily, but I fear all the time he spends supine only allows fluid to gather in his lungs and worsens his constipation. On the other hand, when he rises, he so quickly exhausts his capacity for breathing it is frightening. I plead with him to achieve some kind of normalcy, a regular schedule and more hygienic habits, but it seems all in vain.

At last, some peace. Marthe looked lovely although very nervous. I would have thought that the civil ceremony rather prepared one for the mass a few days later, but she looked quite white with fear on Monday. Dick was very good and grown-up, and clearly his presence helped her, which is a good sign already.

The church was splendid. Marie-Marguerite was
altogether right about the flowers, and I was so glad Madame took her tactful advice. It does not do to exaggerate things—overwhelm your guests with blossoms and they only think you are ostentatious. Better to spend the money on the wine, as Adrien always says. Besides, what the original proposal might have done to Marcel I hate to think. As it was, he wore two overcoats to the church to prevent against chills. If he had pollen into the bargain, he would never have survived.

He was supposed to take Valentine in, but she was quite aghast by his appearance and balked—silly girl, Henriette does need to teach her a little more seriousness. It is all very well to be spritely when one is young, but giddy is not right at all. It is something I very much like about Marthe who is always gracious, and when she gets the nerves, she does not giggle but simply retreats into silence. Anyway, in the end Georges got Valentine under control—she was all for crying about it, which was ridiculous, but he put a stop to that right away and saw her into the church himself, while Marcel in his two overcoats gave his arm to his aunt. Marcel can be quite the gentleman with his grand hostesses, but I do think the younger ones just make him nervous in the end.

Dick and Marthe got safely away. Her going-away dress was the most lovely pale blue and she was looking much cheerier by that point, and thanked me most prettily for everything. So, we are starting off on the right foot, I believe.

A
T THE WEDDING
, I wear a pink dress with bright flowers spattered across its full skirt. Afterwards, I wish I had worn any other colour, a deep blue or lush green, some colour that would make me look gracious and distant, but instead I am dressed with immediacy in shades of need. Max stands beside me in a suit.

I have just finished my certificate in Ottawa and will now return permanently to Montreal, free to push our friendship in some clearer direction. But I am too late. Max has completed an internship here and returns home in a month’s time. After much pleading from his parents, he has agreed to begin his residency in Toronto. He has found a place in internal medicine at Toronto General. It is downtown; he likes the look of the work, thinks he will see interesting patients. He is leaving for good then, this summer. Time is running out and I am desperate that something should finally happen. And, I suppose, in a way, it does.

At the end of the night, when I thank the bride’s mother and compliment her on the day’s events, she says airily, “The kids just wanted something small but I wanted for it to be nice.” So, while everything is small, it exists in huge profusion as mother and daughter have fought to reconcile their conflicting notions of display. The guests are thin and carefully sheathed in tight little cocktail dresses or smooth dark suits, but they number in the hundreds, milling about before dinner eating dainty pieces of black bread coated in smoked salmon and sipping French champagne. A single, glossy white lily sits at the centre of every table, and all three bridesmaids are dressed in white, in minor versions of the wedding gown itself.

We arrive late at the ceremony, as the bridal party is entering the low-ceilinged salon that will stand in for the
synagogue, with rows of padded chairs, made to accommodate overfed executives dozing through training sessions and sales meetings, taking the place of pews. I mistake the first bridesmaid, with her white lace gown and small bouquet, for the bride herself, but she is then followed by a second and a third, until the mightiest dress of all trails into the room. We follow in its wake and cautiously settle into our chairs, but not quietly enough to avoid sidelong glances from the other guests.

As the ceremony begins, I scan the room and realize every man is wearing a small satin yarmulke carefully pinned to his scalp. I wonder momentarily that there are no Gentiles amongst the guests but quickly realize my mistake. The yarmulkes have been distributed at the outset and Max alone has not got one, having arrived too late. He appears bareheaded in the sight of God, if God is present somewhere beneath this stucco ceiling with its bronze domed lamps. He sits with his hands folded, a hint of slightly superior amusement animating his features. He notices that I have my arms crossed, and silently mimics me, mocking what he perceives as my discomfort with his culture, but I suspect he is more ill at ease here than I am.