Travelling Light Read Free

— so closely he hardly got a shot on goal. And when Beliveau, captain of the Canadiens, skated his victory lap, Cup hoisted high, sweat soaking his red jersey black, how you cried and cried.
    He Died
    He died in a hospital room in Montreal believing he was in Frankfurt and it was 1939. He had returned that summer hoping to persuade his Catholic but hopelessly cosmopolitan parents to quit Germany for England or Canada. He was unsuccessful. He managed to squeeze aboard the last train for Rotterdam with his British passport, hours before England declared war. He was stranded at Rotterdam for three weeks before he got passage to New York. From there he caught the train up to Montreal, where half a century later he sits up in his hospital bed commanding me to fetch his suitcase from the closet, we have to get to the Bahnhof, catch the last train, the Dutch frontier will be closing and he’ll be trapped in a country gone insane. Quickly. Hurry. Hurry!
    Intersection
    Frances has a partner at last and pays the fertilization clinic and they have a baby girl and Frances loves their baby but the partner will sometimes remark, almost casually, that the baby is, after all, her baby, not their baby. The partner threatens to take the baby and move back to Russia or to Toronto and we see how difficult this is for Frances to hear, how vulnerable she is, how hard she works to support her little family, and we resent her partner for being cold, ungrateful, and more than a little crazy. A few days before the baby’s first birthday Frances is on a business trip to Chicago. It’s raining. The car she’s a passenger in runs a red light and gets T-boned by a truck. Frances is killed. What does her life feel like to her, approaching that intersection in the rain? Does it have a texture and a shape? Is it something she can nearly hold in her arms, like a baby?
    But Frances lives within herself — then she doesn’t — and what she knows she never tells.
    French Kids (II)
    My father was dead and I finally persuaded Mother to leave the flat, which had become too large and empty after years of being too small and crowded. Five or six different landlords had owned the building during the past few years. The heating machinery was breaking down. The janitor had died and there was no one to shovel the snow from the steps. I found her an apartment in a modern building with a doorman, just down the street from the church where she was married. On the last day of the move I was putting a last carton of odds and ends into the trunk of my rented car when I saw Daniel, one of the French kids, across the street. I had not spoken to him in twenty-five years, except once when I helped him and his brother push a car out of a snowbank. Now Daniel was also loading cardboard cartons into the trunk of a car, a Toyota, the same model my mother owned, except blue, not grey. I crossed the street and we shook hands. For years I had been taking French lessons in California; at last we spoke the same language. He said his mother was leaving the neighbourhood as well, going back to Victoriaville, where she had grown up. He was a mathematician, his brother Yvon a sound engineer. It was like an encounter with a friendly stranger, also with someone you are afraid knows you too well. I don’t know why children who share a street, a neighbourhood, prefer to ignore history until it shrivels and carries no weight and finally melts away like snow does eventually, even in Montreal, but that was what we had done and it was too late to do anything about all that now.

YELLOW DRESS
    This time Dr. and Mrs. Ormonde had been invited to a conference in Moscow and another in Helsinki. Every time they went away routines were broken, food tasted differently, the house itself felt foreign. Silver-framed family photographs on the hall table seemed like portraits of strangers, and Ross felt he and his sister Anna were living the lives of different people, not the