Montreal Stories Read Online Free Page A

hightailed it right back to England,” said Mr. Fenton. “The Canadian taxpayers had to pay to bring her over.Nobody ever figured out where she got the money to go back. Even Des didn’t know.”
    “Des never knew anything. He never knew what he should have known. All he noticed was she had gotten fat since the last time he saw her.”
    “She arrived with a bun in the oven,” said Mr. Fenton. “Four, five months. Des had already been back in Canada for six. So …” He turned his attention to Nora. “Your dad get overseas, Nora?”
    “He tried.”
    “And?”
    “He was already thirty-nine and he had the two children. They told him he was more useful sticking to his job.”
    “We needed civilians, too,” said Mr. Fenton, showing generosity. “Two, did you say? Ray’s got two kids?”
    “There’s my sister, Gerry—Geraldine. She’s a novice now, up in the Laurentians.”
    “Where?” He twisted the rearview mirror, so he could see her.
    “Near St. Jerome. She’s on the way to being a nun.”
    That shut him up, for the time being. The doctor reached up and turned the mirror the other way. While they were speaking, the baby had started to gush up some awful curdled stuff, which she had to wipe on the skirt of his gown. He had no luggage—not even a spare diaper. The men had rolled down the front windows, but the crossbreeze was sluggish and smelled of warm metal, and did nothing to lighten the presence of Neil.
    “Want to open up back there?” said Mr. Fenton.
    No, she did not. One of her boy cousins had come down with an infected ear, the result of building a model airplane while sitting in a draft.
    “At that stage, they’re only a digestive tube,” said the doctor, fanning himself with his hat.
    “How about the brain?” said Mr. Fenton. “When does thebrain start to work?” He drove without haste, as he did everything else. His elbow rested easily in the window frame. Ashes from his cigarette drifted into Nora’s domain.
    “The brain is still primitive,” the doctor said, sounding sure. “It is still in the darkness of early time.” Nora wondered what “the darkness of time” was supposed to mean. Mr. Fenton must have been wondering too. He started to say something, but the doctor went on in his slow singsong way, “Only the soul is fully developed from birth. The brain …”
    “Newborn, they’ve got these huge peckers,” said Mr. Fenton. “I mean, really developed.”
    “The brain tries to catch up with the soul. For most people, it’s a lifelong struggle.”
    “If you say so, Alex,” Mr. Fenton said.
    The baby wasn’t primitive, surely. She examined his face. There wasn’t a hair on him except the blond fluff around his forehead. Primitive man, shaggy all over, dragged his steps through the recollection of a movie she had seen. Speak for yourself, she wanted to tell the doctor. Neil is not
primitive
. He just wants to understand where he’s going. Her duty was to hand over to its mother this bit of a child, an only son without a stitch to his name. Socks, gown, and diaper were fit to be burned, not worth a washtub of water. So her sister had gone through an open door and the door had swung to behind her. She had left to Nora everything she owned. So Marie Antoinette, younger than Nora, had been stripped to the skin when she reached the border of France, on the way to marry a future king. Total strangers had been granted the right to see her nude. The clothes she had been wearing were left on the ground and she was arrayed in garments so heavy with silver and embroidery she could hardly walk. Her own ladies-in-waiting, who spoke her native language, were turned back. (Nora could not remember where Marie Antoinette had started out.) “For we brought nothing …,” Nora’s Methodist Abbott grandmother liked to point out, convinced thatCatholics never cracked a Bible and had to be kept informed. “Naked we came …” was along the same line. Nora knew how to dress and