The Romantic (9 page)

“Dear Mrs. Richter. Welcome to Oaktree Terrace. I live at number 4. When we had the big snowstorm I heard you sing and I think you have a beautiful voice”

“Dear Mrs. Richter. When you go out in the middle of the night to call your son, don’t think twice about waking people up. We don’t care! We only wish you would dress more warmly. You don’t want to catch cold….”

“Dear Mrs. Richter. In case you’re worried that other children will make fun of your son because he is adopted, I’ll bet they won’t. They don’t make fun of me any more now that I am almost an orphan. My mother left and never came back. I don’t think she will come back. Her last name when she was a girl was Hahn and that is a German name….”

I walk past her house just before dinner, waiting until after dark so that I can see into the lighted living room. It is like no room I’ve ever laid eyes on, jammed with thrillingly romantic old-fashioned furniture: high-backed chairs, a ruby-red chesterfield, dark wooden tables, fringed lampshades of deep greens and blues. Also a piano, which Abelard—or Abel, as I’ve heard him called at school—always seems to be playing. (“Dear Mrs. Richter. I enjoy music very much….”) In the pocket of my jacket is the letter I promised myself I would stick through her mail slot—today would be the day—but I always balk. I don’t even have enough nerve to step on her property.

I pray to run into her and then, when we pass on the street, I lower my eyes. Sometimes I turn and follow her, or “shadow” her as I have learned from Aunt Verna to think of such an activity. Unlike any other grown-up I know, she goes for walks. In her black lace-up boots and her calf-length purple cloth coat, she peers up at the sky and down into sewer grates, she stops and studies people’s houses, and if the owners are out front, shovelling snow or carrying in their groceries, she smiles and waves as if they were her old friends. The owners wave back in a dazed fashion. I can hear their thoughts: “There goes that strange German lady who woke us up last night,” and my heart stumbles after her protectively.

In March I learn that the Richters attend church. The news comes from Maureen Hellier, whom I overhear in the school washroom saying,“She drowns out the whole choir,” and somehow I know that “she” is Mrs. Richter. A few casual questions get me the particulars. Nine a.m. service, St. Mark’s Presbyterian.

I tell my father that I have to go to the Presbyterian church next Sunday because the school music teacher said I should hear the wonderful choir.

“Are you interested in choral music?” he asks with his sometimes frightening intensity.

I nod cautiously.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” And I am forced to listen to excerpts from his record collection while he thrashes around, conducting. Then he says, regarding Sunday,“What the heck, I might even tag along, keep you company,” but since my plan is to sit in Mrs. Richter’s line of sight and look abandoned, I say that I’ve already arranged to go with a group of girls.

“Ah!” Nodding, plunging his hands into his pockets, and for the first time I realize that my living with Mrs. Richter might hurt his feelings and, just as upsetting, that he might fire Mrs. Carver.

Well, when the time comes I’ll just have to figure something out. Visit him every day, I’ll do that, I’ve always intended to do that. From the start, my vision of the future has placed him in the role of a friendly neighbour who is welcome to drop by. Mrs. Carver is his loyal housekeeper, and his Scrabble partner, once he teaches her to play.

As for Mr. Richter and Abel, they feature hardly at all. I picture them in other rooms or out of the house, except at meal times, and then I picture them eating quickly and in silence like hired hands. All my creative thought is consecrated to fantasies of Mrs. Richter and me. Together we bake cakes and pies, flour whitening our arms and identical frilly aprons. She teaches me how to play the piano. I braid
her hair. She calls me Greta, after herself,“Little Greta.” She lies beside me in my bed and tells me the story of her life, which (as I have imagined it) features her father being killed under the wheels of a cart, and her mother, sisters and brothers all dying of the plague, though she nursed them.

Choosing what to wear to the church absorbs me for several days. I must look well brought up but uncared-for. Shabby, but sdii clean and respectable. I finally settle on a yellow wool dress (yellow for luck) with pale green eyelet embroidery encircling the wrists and neck. I’ve grown out of it, as I have most of my clothes, and this alone suggests at least some neglect, although not enough to attract attention. On Saturday afternoon, while my father is at the hardware store, I let the hem down in several places and rip a few holes in the embroidery. I plan to vandalize the matching yellow coat as well, but lose heart when I remember the morning I wore it to the dentist’s and my father said,“That colour suits you down to the ground.”

My mother, that morning, wore her white fox-fur stole, and thinking of the stole, its repulsive head, I go down the hall to my parents’ bedroom, open the cedar chest and pull it out from under a pile of blankets.

I try tearing the head off right there but it won’t give. I drag it to my father’s study, get a pair of scissors from his desk and start cutting. Not an easy job through such thick fur, and when at last the head falls, the pointed nose hitting my stockinged foot, I feel deliberately struck, and I loop a handful of fur around one of the scissor blades and push the blade through. I do it again, a third time, then I hurl the
stole across the room. I snatch up the head and hurl that, too.

Bits of fur toss in the draft from the heat vents. The stole slouches against a bookcase. The head has landed on the filing cabinet and it lies face up, one black beady eye aimed my way. “Who cares?” I think furiously.

Not my mother, that’s for sure. My father would, if he found out. Which he won’t. He never paws through her things any more. I suspect he no longer even knows, as I do, to the hairpin, exactly what her things consist of.

I get a paper grocery bag and put the head and stray fur inside it and then stuff the bag in the outside garbage pail. Back in my bedroom, I try on the stole and conclude that it’s just right: tattered, a wreck, really, and yet genuine fox fur, after all. I think that instead of a hat I should wear one of my mother’s kerchiefs so that I’ll look more German.

The next morning I am up at a quarter to seven. Without turning on a light, I use the bathroom and tiptoe down to the kitchen where I pour myself a bowl of cereal, but my stomach heaves at the prospect of eating. I sit at the table, chewing the sides of my thumbnail.

I haven’t slept well. I kept waking up from bad dreams. Once, it was Mrs. Richter calling for Abel that woke me, and I went to the window and watched her swell out of the darkness. Another time I bolted upright at the thought of the collection plate, and I got out of bed and shook two quarters from my piggy bank and wrapped them in a handkerchief, which I tucked into the pocket of the yellow coat.

I pour my untouched cereal into the sink and return to
the bedroom. Although it’s only seven-fifteen, I put on the yellow dress and a red kerchief, red to match Mrs. Richter’s shawl. I sit on the edge of the bed. After a few minutes I feel cold and I wrap myself in the stole and lie down, just my upper body, with the stole under my cheek.

And in the fur, I smell my mother. The faintest whiff—a dead-roses blend of perfume and cigarette smoke—but startling for being so intimately and unambiguously her.

I push the stole onto the floor. “She’s gone,” I think, awed. Oh, I know she has left and is never coming back. What has just struck me is the corollary: I will never see her again.

I say it out loud: “I will never see her again,” and the room seems to dilate, and I smell the bleach Mrs. Carver uses to whiten the sheets, and it’s as if I’m being offered an atmosphere open and antiseptic enough that I might dwell on her without conjuring her back into our lives. Almost nostalgically, I remember the silver satin scooped-back dress she wore one New Year’s Eve. I picture something I never witnessed: her smiling and waving goodbye. I let that image glide away until all I see is a tiny white-gloved hand fluttering, until the hand is a speck, and outside my window the streetlamp goes off.

It’s seven-thirty. Still far too early, but down the hall my father is coughing, so I retrieve the stole and slip out of the room. In the front hall, as I’m putting on my boots, there is a moment in which I know how preposterous it is to imagine that Mrs. Richter will want to adopt me. Well, I haven’t any provision for reconsidering let alone calling a halt to the plan. All I
have
is the plan, and it’s under way.

A cold, windless, grey dawn. From the street I can see a light on in the Richters’ bathroom, and as I am under the impression (no doubt because of something my mother said) that European women never take baths or showers, a picture enters my mind of Mrs. Richter standing at the sink in a corset, sponging her bare arms. It’s a disturbing image: her large bosom (my mother’s was small), the dark rift between her breasts, and the breasts themselves, bulging like bread loaves. I throw clothes into the picture … anything, a bathrobe. All the way to the church I drape Mrs. Richter in assorted voluminous dresses. By the time I arrive I have her resplendent in an ermine-trimmed hooded cape over a floor-length burgundy gown, the kind of outfit I imagine the queen might wear on Sundays.

But never into this church.

I stand there looking at it. Not for the first time I wonder if God even knows what it is. Except for the peaked roof and the plain plank cross on top, it could be a factory. Two cars are in the parking lot. The door is probably open, I could go in. But I resist. Considering how I look (suddenly I’m not nearly as confident as I was in my bedroom) I decide I’d better stick to my plan of slipping in at the last minute with the stragglers, not drawing too much attention to myself beforehand. I cross the street to a low-rise apartment building. On its front steps I sit and tuck my hands in my armpits, nesde the lower half of my face into the stole. Nobody else is around, no cars are on the road. I start to sing, quietly, the songs my father belts out in the shower, or used to belt out when my mother lived with us: “Way down among Brazilians, coffee beans grow by the millions …”
and “I want to win some winsome miss, can’t go on like this …” At the edge of my vision the Angel of Love flickers weakly.

About a half-hour passes before I see another soul. It’s a woman, coming out of the apartment building. Rough-looking, a motorcycle-gang type in a brown leather jacket and tight red slacks. I shift sideways to let her pass. She squints at me over her shoulder. “That’s bad luck,” I think, that mean squint, and I cast around for lucky signs: a black squirrel, a Royal Mail truck, anything yellow.

My extremities are now losing sensation. I am on the verge of getting up and trying the door of the apartment building when people begin materializing across the road. A family of five teeters on the icy lawn, and at the same time two cars pull into the lot. Another car arrives, another. Pretty soon there’s a stream of people … in which no very tall lady appears. The church has a back entrance, though; it’s possible the Richters have gone in that way.

When the stream begins to thin out, I stand. “Please God,” I say. I go down the steps. I feel as if I’m walking toward an open manhole, passersby screaming “Stop!” but I can’t hear them because I’ve drunk a potion, I’m hypnotized, I’m the living dead. At the church door, as I reach out my hand, a man’s gloved hand grabs the handle. Where did
he
come from? There’s a lady, too. “Oh my!” she says. The man pulls the door open, and I dash inside, stumbling into another lady, who snaps,“Watch out!”

With numb fingers 1 tug the kerchief over my brow.

At least twenty people still linger in the foyer. I thought they’d all have gone straight to their seats. I shuffle forward
among a small crowd moving in the direction of a hall where an organ plays. I hear a lady say,
“Who?”
and another lady say,“The Kirk girl.” Behind me, a voice I recognize cries,“Louise?”

Maureen Hellier, together with three other girls from my class. They block the top of a basement stairwell, boys and girls of all ages jostling to get by them, and it dawns on me that children go somewhere else, separate from their parents. “Sunday school,” I think. I’d forgotten that there was such a place.

In my confusion I stare back at the girls, and after a moment they grab each other’s arms and whisper, and then, in unison, present to me faces of great concern, great kindness. My mother’s disappearance has driven me to create this spectacle, their faces announce. Well,
they
understand. The blame lies not with me but with my tragedy. (More to the point, with Mrs. Carver, as I will learn tomorrow when Maureen comes up to me and says,“That lady who looks after you should have told you what a person wears to church. Why didn’t she mend your dress? Your father should fire her.” And I will say, coward that I have become in the schoolyard, betrayer of all I hold dear,“She
made
me wear that stole. She’s crazy.”)

But here, in the foyer, I am at a loss. What’s the point of going down to the basement? Mrs. Richter won’t be there. Will I be allowed in with the adults, though? The third alternative—leaving—doesn’t occur to me. I resume my shuffle. I pass through the doors.

I’m in.

I step to one side and scan the seated congregation. I
don’t see her, or Mr. Richter, but with all the ladies wearing hats and with some people still standing and obstructing my view, it’s hard to tell. Everyone seems to be staring at me, so I start moving up the aisle, peering from under my kerchief until I reach the second row, and there, because I haven’t got what it takes to walk all the way to the back again, I sit.

She isn’t here.

Only one other person occupies my pew. A hunched-over old woman. She twists my way and nods. I nod back, shrugging the stole off my shoulders. I fold up the hem of my dress where it droops. I would like to remove my screaming-red kerchief as well—I have a sense of everybody behind me being shocked—except I’m not sure that showing your hair isn’t the greater sin.