Serafim and Claire

AND

CLAIRE

Mark Lavorato

Copyright © 2014 Mark Lavorato

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This edition published in 2014 by
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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Lavorato, Mark, 1975–, author
         Serafim and Claire / Mark Lavorato.

Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-77089-365-8 (pbk.).—ISBN 978-1-77089-366-5 (html)

I. Title.

PS8623.A866S47 2014         C813'.6         C2013-904539-2
                                                                        C2013-904540-6

Cover design: Alysia Shewchuk
Cover photographs : Upper © Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis;
Lower © Luis Alvarez/Getty Images ; Ornaments and curtain © iStock

We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund.

For Montreal
And for my family of friends there

BURNING-IN

Ville de Québec, le 23 janvier 1928

Ma chère petite sœur,

It must be said that your last letter troubles me. I know you very well, Claire; well enough to understand when you're keeping something from me. It pains me to think of you in some kind of adversity, while having convinced yourself, in that blindingly stubborn way of yours, that you must face whatever it is alone.

I need not remind you of the things (and one set of precarious details in particular) that I bared to you, trusting, knowing, that you would not judge me. True to your word, I believe you never have. Is it so absurd to think I could reciprocate such clemency? As sisters, we share a bond that other members of a family can never know, a closeness in which only you and I can trust.

You should know that I bring you up as an unruly topic every time I visit or write Maman and Papa. They came to spend Christmas here with Gilles and I last month, and I must report that they are, sadly, as traditionalist and pious as always. On a walk we took alone, Papa asked for news of you.

At any rate, please, know that I am here if you need me, Claire. Montreal is only a brief train ride from Quebec City, and I would be on the next itinerary out should you wish it.

Avec toute ma chaleureuse affection,

Cécile

It was madness,
and she knew it. Yet Claire A
udette could not help needing to hear the song on the phonograph again, one last time, before she picked up the telephone. She watched the device (a second-hand Victrola) from her bed, where she shivered under a pile of duvets and blankets that she had wrapped tightly around herself, shuddering uncontrollably, her teeth clacking in her cheeks, a deafening woodpecker in a forest of dark thoughts. Thoughts, she was aware, that were drifting helplessly towards delirium. Her fever was on the rise; and she could be sure of this by the way the coldness in her muscles was sinking, deeper, into her bones, into the marrow beneath them, turning the jelly there into grating grains of frost. She felt like, even if the fever were to pass, she would never
really
warm up again. Not fully.

But the record on the gramophone had come to its end, and was now blankly rising and falling as it spun, the needle tirelessly tracing the contours, seesawing with the wobble of its vinyl orbit. The single speaker awash with a scratching sea song, the record's dust and blemishes lapping predictable waves against the shores of her tiny room. Claire drifted through it.

Until, shaking her head in a sudden snap of clarity, she realized that she had to formulate some kind of plan before her faculty to do so had entirely slipped away. With great focus she managed to think of what she would do next, but the undertaking took its toll, and her eyes began to close. She struggled to hold them open, fought the growing urge to just succumb. It was as if her body were quicksilver, a dense weight flattening itself out, chrome puddles coagulating into her mattress, sinking, heavy, through the cushion of its fabric.

Time passed — anywhere between a couple of seconds and a few hours — and she started awake, this time quickly rolling herself off the bed, where she called out from a pain that clenched her stomach. As it receded, she squatted, shivering over the bedpan with her skirts hiked up, finished urinating, replaced her Kotex from a box under the bed, and stood to make her way to the gramophone. She was stopped by another pain in her abdomen, which had her anchored there, motionless, until it passed. She was weaker than she'd been only hours ago, her legs fatigued and shaky. But she could still move them, thankfully, could still walk herself out of the apartment. She made it to the Victrola, replaced the needle, clutched the heavy phone, and sat on the floor, her back against the pot belly of the stove in the centre of the room, a bit of warmth already beginning to seep through the layers of blankets as the song, every note memorized, wound up into its first verse.

Claire closed her eyes, picturing each movement, each spin and swirl that she had recently been choreographing to the music. She could see the dancers she'd envisioned on either side of her, supporting her at centre stage in the brighter light. The crescendo, two more dancers joining in from either side, the orchestra swelling, hands pointing in to Claire, her arms outstretched in return. The unpredictable dénouement, slow, subtle, the other dancers retreating, vanishing into the unlit extremities of the stage. Her graceful bow. The deafening applause. The flowers bouncing at her feet. She straightens, beaming, blows a kiss, another, just before bowing a final time.

Claire opened her eyes to her cold, claustrophobic apartment. A phone stood erect beside her. In front of her, a yellow water stain leafed along the wall, sprouting down from the ceiling and fanning out like lichen. The snow-choked wind scratched at the window. All while the Victrola washed its static waves through the quiet once more.

Endeavouring not to fall asleep again, Claire reached for the phone. She had prepared a nuanced, underhanded threat for her family doctor, but exactly how she'd worded it, rehearsing it in her mind for what felt like days, was gone. She was far too exhausted to make another plan, so she drunkenly lifted the receiver, held the candlestick stand.

She heard a woman's voice, anonymous, abrupt. “Code and number, please.”

“Uhm . . . Lorimier. Zero. Five. One-seven.”

On the fourth ring, and likely just before the operator would have cut in to say there wasn't anyone home, Dr. Bertrand answered. Claire slowly gave her name, and her old family doctor recognized her voice immediately. She told him that she was very, very ill, and needed to see him right away. The doctor, wasting no time, had grabbed a pencil and paper and asked for her address, promising that he would be over directly.

“No,” she said, “no. I will come to your office instead.”

“Unthinkable,” he replied, citing the snow, the storm, the high banks that were clogging the streets around the city, the fact that it was well after midnight, “absolutely not.”

“Please,” she insisted, “you don't understand. Be ready. I am coming immediately.” She hung up.

Claire stood, and was temporarily paralyzed with another spasm of pain. It occurred to her that she didn't have it in her to get properly dressed, that she was about to go out in public in a way that might very well see her committed. She shuffled towards her front door with no other choice, wrestled her boots on, then a woollen toque (the kind only children wore), switched off the lights, and paused at the humming of the wind in the porch, where a letter from her sister still lay on the floorboards, unread. Being committed, going to jail, even dying in the storm before making it there — they were all just as likely, really. She felt herself begin to cry, half-heartedly, and heaving open the door, she stepped out into the blizzard. The storm hungrily pulled her forward and slammed the door behind her.

Down the stairs, her blankets flapping, and out onto the snow-drifted sidewalk. The high banks rising to the road obscured both the street and the row of houses on the other side. It would not be possible to see carriages or vehicles as they passed. Above her, wild flakes swarmed the street lights like disturbed hives of albino wasps. The footprints of one or two previous pedestrians plodded out into the distance in front of her, soon vanishing into the abandoned night. She lumbered forward, following them, re-stamping them with her own wobbling footfalls.

At the first intersection, she climbed instinctively over the bank and into the middle of the street, to the centre of the X, where a pain in her stomach suddenly brought her to her knees then eased her to the icy ground. She huddled there, buried in her blankets, convulsing with shivers. The wind moaned through the wires above the intersection, a low, haunting, apathetic hymn.

After some time, she had the vague feeling of being lifted, carried, and placed into a small bit of warmth. The smell of animal furs. A man's voice, asking her something. Claire answering weakly, a name and intersection — Dr. Bertrand, Mont-Royal and Chambord — sure that she couldn't be heard above the wind. The weight of more furs, heavy on top of her, a horse snorting, nickering, movement, sleigh bells. Another man's voice. The sensation of being carried again. A door being shut. Then, for some time, quiet.

The next thing Claire remembered was the feeling of warm hands placing a cool circle onto her chest, fingers pressing at her breasts then her stomach, which had her biting her lip and wincing. The feeling of cold metal between her legs, questions from the doctor about when the fever began, what kind of pain she felt, where, for how long — none of which she could summon the energy to answer.

After some time floating between awareness and a peaceful lack of consciousness, Claire sensed a bustle of irritated movement: drawers slamming, whispered curses, a teakettle squealing to a boil, a table shoved closer, tinkling instruments laid out on a cloth at her side. She realized that her clothes had somehow been removed, and felt soapy water and a sponge scrubbing at her belly, streams of water dripping around her waist and thighs. Then a high lamp with a harsh white light was adjusted over the centre of her body, a glass bottle and some gauze placed beside her right ear.

Finally, there was a hand on her forehead. “Can you hear me, Claire?”

Claire could only produce a weak hum before turning her head away.

“Claire, I cannot actually see what is wrong. But it is clear that you have a very serious infection. To know more, to . . . find out what's causing it, I will have to open you up.”

Claire gave another meagre hum, slothful blink.

The doctor let out a sigh, opened the bottle, and poured a cloyingly sweet liquid onto a square of gauze. He placed it over her mouth, where the tincture clung cold against her lips.

Claire stared at the light bulb above her. A faint buzzing in her head began to grow louder, distending, lifting her, as if she were as weightless as the light in the bulb. Then darkness encroached, shadows tightening along the periphery of her vision, a blackness engulfing everything. Until only the bulb was left fighting it, stark and strident, a tiny coil of wire holding tight to its own heat, its light still managing to burn through the black, even through her eyelids. The light was hers now. The light was her. In the way it had always been. All her life. And she could feel it, still, burning in, searing through the dark.