Dear Life

“Well I did too. It doesn’t mean we have to show up.”
    “I sort of feel as if I’d promised her.”
    “Well. Now you can sort of unpromise her. It will be dreadful, believe me.”
    I did as he told me, though I did not see Mary, to tell her. I was waiting where he had instructed me to be, on the open porch outside the front door. I was wearing my best dress of dark green crepe with the little pearl buttons and the real lace collar, and had rammed my feet into suede high-heeled shoes inside my snow boots. I waited past the time mentioned—worried, first, that Matron would come out of her office and spot me, and second, that he would have forgotten all about it.
    But then he came along, buttoning up his overcoat, and apologized.
    “Always a few bits and bobs to clear up,” he said, and led me under the bright stars around the building to his car. “Are you steady?” he said, and when I said yes—though I wondered about the suede shoes—he did not offer his arm.
    His car was old and shabby as most cars were in those days. It didn’t have a heater. When he said we were going to his house I was relieved. I could not see how we would manage with the crowd at the hotel and I had hoped not to make do with the sandwiches at the café.
    In the house, he told me not to take off my coat until the place was warmed up a bit. He got busy at once making a fire in the woodstove.
    “I’m your janitor and your cook and your server,” he said.“It’ll soon be comfortable here and the meal won’t take me long. Don’t offer to help, I prefer to work alone. Where would you like to wait? If you want to you could look over the books in the front room. It shouldn’t be too unbearable in there with your coat on. The house is heated with stoves throughout and I don’t heat up a room if it isn’t in use. The light switch is just inside the door. You don’t mind if I listen to the news? It’s a habit I’ve got into.”
    I went into the front room, feeling as if I had more or less been ordered to, leaving the kitchen door open. He came and closed it, saying, “Just until we get a bit of warmth in the kitchen,” and went back to the somberly dramatic, almost religious voice of the CBC, giving out the news of this last year of the war. I had not been able to hear that voice since I left my grandparents’ apartment and I rather wished that I could have stayed in the kitchen. But there were quantities of books to look at. Not just on bookshelves but on tables and chairs and windowsills and piled on the floor. After I had examined several of them I concluded that he favored buying books in batches and probably belonged to several book clubs. The Harvard Classics. The Histories of Will and Ariel Durant—the very same that could be found on my grandfather’s shelves. Fiction and poetry seemed in short supply, though there were a few surprising children’s classics.
    Books on the American Civil War, the South African War, the Napoleonic Wars, the Peloponnesian Wars, the campaigns of Julius Caesar.
Explorations of the Amazon and the Arctic. Shackleton Caught in the Ice. Franklin’s Doom, The Donner Party, The Lost Tribes: Buried Cities of Central Africa, Newton and Alchemy, Secrets of the Hindu Kush
. Books suggesting someone anxious to know, to possess great scattered lumpsof knowledge. Perhaps not someone whose tastes were firm and exacting.
    So when he had asked me, “Which Russian novel?” it was possible that he had not had so firm a platform as I had thought.
    When he called “Ready,” and I opened the door, I was armed with this new skepticism.
    I said, “Who do you agree with, Naphta or Settembrini?”
    “I beg your pardon?”
    “In
The Magic Mountain
. Do you like Naphta best or Settembrini?”
    “To be honest, I’ve always thought they were a pair of windbags. You?”
    “Settembrini is more humane but Naphta is more interesting.”
    “They tell you that in school?”
    “I never read it in school,” I said coolly.
    He gave me a quick look, the eyebrow raised.
    “Pardon me. If there’s anything in there that interests you, feel free. Feel free to come down here and read in your time off. There’s an electric heater I could set up, since I imagine you are not experienced with woodstoves. Shall we think about that? I can rustle you up an extra key.”
    “Thank you.”
    Pork chops for supper, mashed potatoes, canned peas. Dessert was an apple pie from the bakery, which would have been better if he