Felice: a Travelogue

By Robert Harlow

Felice Gentry, just recovered from a hysterectomy, is told by her celebratory husband that hes booked a trip that will take them to Poland for a visit with friends in the Canadian Embassy there. After that they will tour Europe. He will close his dental practice down for a couple of months and they will leave their university age daughter to house sit. Dutiful wife, Felice says yes, although reluctantly. She is persuaded to give in only because old friends, Ben and Beth Collison, will host their stay behind the Iron Curtain.

She and husband Ray pick up their visas in Montreal and, on the day before they board the Polish liner that will take them to London and then Gdynia, they go to have a look at the ship in its berth. There, Felice sees a strange sight: a woman squatting suddenly to urinate beside a van in the parking garage. The womans husband sits on the nearby curb, hardly bothering to notice.

On the ship, the woman appears again. She has dyed black hair, a ruined face, does not speak to other passengers, and during the whole voyage (16 days, including a stop in London) wears the same shiny black dress patterned with large yellow flowers. Among the people at Felice and Rays table in the ships dining room is a professor of Slav Studies from Ottawa, who knows a good deal about Poland. Felice does not know that she will meet her, as well as the urinating woman, after the voyage to Gdynia is done. When the ship leaves London, a third woman of significance to Felices adventure appears. Felice thinks she is Brittany who, along with her twin sister Pam, was sent from England at the beginning of WWll, forty years ago now, to live with cousins of their mother, an older couple who lived next door to Felice (when her name was Phyllis) in Medicine Hat, Alberta. A year older than Felice, they were different from Prairie folk. They had lovely accents and lived in a fantasy world of What If that also included Felice. But the woman does not answer to Brittany and merely smiles graciously at Felice, who feels dismissed but still curious.

Ben Collison meets the ship and drives them in his VW Rabbit to his embassy home in Warsaw. This is a new posting for him, and for the moment he lives alone, looked after by a daily housekeeper, Pani Irena. His wife, Beth, and their children are not due to arrive until Ben is better settled. His plans for his guests include going first to Warsaw Old Town and later on down to Krakov in the south of the country.

One afternoon on the ship, Felice saw a documentary about the rebirth of Warsaw from out of the rubble left behind by the Germans, re-built, brick by brick, by people who did not have enough to eat, but whose love for country and city and Old Town was bigger than the need for food. She watched old women and men dressed in tatters move bricks and stones to reconstruct precious buildings again. Not Communist propaganda, this was a look into the Polish heart and mind. She wept. Now in Old town she weeps again, but there is the beginning of something else, an unaccustomed anger that would begin her personal transformation. Near the centre of Old Town there is a free cinema where a film of the rise and fall and rise again of Old Town is shown in a number of languages. When she passes by she is told that the next showing is in German. Stunned, she asks how Germans could show themselves here after what they did to Warsaw. The ticket-taker shrugs.

During a trip to Krakov, Ben turns off the highway and takes them to Auschwitz, a place he is curious to see. Here, Felices mind and senses almost immediately begin to be assaulted by strange sights. Ben opts to see the Holocaust film that plays continuously at the cinema just inside the reception centre. Ray wont let Felice go into the camp alone. He follows her, his camera constantly at his eye to prevent him from seeing too much.

At the gate to the main camp, Felice buys a book written by a German who was a guard here during the

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jan 18, 2002
• ISBN: 9781465315670

Robert Harlow

SHORT BIO The author, most recently of Necessary Dark, a novel based largely on his experiences in WWll, Robert Harlow was born in Northern British Columbia in 1923, worked for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation from 1951 ro 1965, and was between 1965 and 1977 Head of the Department of Creative Writing at The University of British Columbia. He was short listed in 1972 for the Governor General's Award for Literature, and in 2001 he received the Terasen Lifetime Achievement Award for an outstanding literary career. Since 1990, he has lived with writer and artist Sally Ireland on one of the Gulf Islands that lie between B.C.'s Lower Mainland and Vancouver Island. When Tomorrow Dies

Book preview

FELICE:

A TRAVELOGUE

Robert Harlow

Copyright © 2001 by Robert Harlow.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any

form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording,

or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing

from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the

product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to

any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

To order additional copies of this book, contact:

Xlibris Corporation

1-888-7-XLIBRIS

www.Xlibris.com

[e-mail]

Contents

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1

And now there was talk of going to Warsaw. It was one of his sudden dreams that took up most of his consciousness until he could make them come true—fever dreams, Felice called them. Their sailboat, for instance, thirty-eight feet long and gradually filled up with all of the electronic gadgets he insisted were needed for rough West Coast sailing. Or this house they lived in: she’d found it, but the address on 2nd Avenue in Point Grey overlooking Spanish Banks had been a vision of Ray’s since they’d first come to Vancouver as a young dentist and his wife, after a prairie wedding and a Jasper honeymoon in 1955.

Warsaw was where Beth and Ben Collison were, at the Canadian Embassy. They hadn’t seen Ben more than a half-dozen times since they’d been together at University in Edmonton, and they’d seen Beth not at all. A month in Poland with them: would they have anything in common any more? Ray didn’t appear to care. When else would they have friends to visit behind the Iron Curtain? Poland in July would offer good weather, at least: and she assumed she’d be fully recovered from her February surgery. It was the middle of April.

She was sitting in a brocaded egg-shell chair opposite daughter Judy’s piano—had been for some time now—and on her lap was a book, an empty lined book designed to be somebody’s journal. It had been a present from Ray on her birthday in late March, one of those elegant small gifts he liked to buy her to garnish the celebration each year. On the flyleaf, in his dentist’s scrawl, he’d written, You’ve always wanted to write. It might have been an instruction, except instructions weren’t his style. Ray leaned on things, always cheerful, but not often mindlessly so. The book had a leather cover, hand-tooled, and its paper was thick and a little ragged at the edges. The lines on the pages were cerise but delicate. When she wrote—if she did write—she wanted it to be something hard headed. It was designed to be used by a gentle diarist. Already the book was defining what she was not.

The lined pages were asking her to think clearly about herself, and what was on top, of course, was that she’d had cancer, a hysterectomy and then a three-day wait before the laboratory had finally agreed that her doctor, Bill Morton, had got it all. The news had not made her sentimentally grateful; she’d felt anger at finally having to admit she was mortal. Every day made shorter the odds that calamity, or disease, or the failure of a vital organ would kill her. And slowly, during her convalescence since the operation she had begun to focus the energy her anger had given her.

It was 1981, she was forty-eight years old and neutered, which might be a kind of freedom.

Call a spayed a spayed.

That wasn’t what anyone who knew her would expect to find written in her journal. She wondered if she wanted to put anything about herself down on paper. When she’d opened Ray’s gift, she’d smiled and told him, I think if I’d really wanted to write, I’d’ve done it a long time ago.

Never too late.

Maybe for some things.

Write your story. The idea had pleased him. For the kids, me, your grandchildren when they come along. How many people know really who their grandmothers were?

A good question. She didn’t know her own grandparents. Perhaps there had been a vague presence early on: a visit by an overdressed woman, her mother’s mother, who’d lived in a place called Bewdley in rural Ontario. She’d come in 1936 when Felice was three years old. Her father’s mother had died of the great Spanish flu in 1919. And both grandfathers were dead by that time too: a burst appendix (Grandfather Borden on her father’s side) and consumption (Grandfather Prentiss).

Grandfather Borden had been a railroader out of Sudbury, and his son, her father, had gone west to Medicine Hat. Why? Because there was an opening on the CPR Bridge and Building gang working out of there, and an old school friend of his father’s was the boss. Mary Prentiss had gone to Alberta with a friend from Normal School to teach in a little school forty miles west of town. Felice knew nothing about their courtship, marriage, honeymoon, only that her father became, eventually, the Section Foreman and then the Yardmaster in town and had built the house she’d lived in while she grew up.

So much for grandparents. No one she’d known had any more than a mother and father (and usually brothers and sisters; but she’d had none) in the family. Everyone else had been from elsewhere too. But, dead or alive, close or away, her grandparents were in their own way there. She looked like neither her father nor her mother, but was, they said, the spit and image of Grandmother Borden, the victim of the Spanish plague: a straight nose, wide-set blue eyes, light brown hair with a natural wave, nothing of her body overblown or out of proportion, and small feet.

She put Ray’s book on Judy’s piano and thought of leaving it there, but it would only annoy their daughter when she wanted to lift the lid to play. The house was awkward now that Judy had persuaded her father to buy her a Yamaha Grand. The only place it would fit was in the room that had always been the dining room. Now the dining room furniture was in the living room across the big entrance hall from the kitchen, and what had been the den (beyond the stairs up to the four bedrooms) was now overcrowded with an extra settee and chair from the living room.

Both Ray and Judy had been cheerful about it: this was temporary. In a couple of years, Judy and the piano would move out and things would be normal again. It was a beautiful piano, black as jet, with square legs and its long curve so elegant that she couldn’t—didn’t—argue. It was, for all its grace, a working instrument three, sometimes four hours a day. Judy was a serious musician and a tyrant. The house was a studio now. She helped to run it not at all. Her bedroom would look as it did when she was nine, except that Felice had a woman come in every morning to housekeep. Judy brought cellists, violinists, woodwind people home. They swarmed, ate, drank, left debris. But they also played sonatas and chamber music. They played sections, sometimes phrases, entrances and themes over until they got them right. She listened from upstairs and could hum Brahms’ Trios, Beethoven violin sonatas, even angular rhythmic melody lines from Bartok, just as she could hear in her head choruses from favourite recordings Ray played over and over again from his jazz collection, which now took up three walls in the den, floor-to-ceiling. She had never had a music lesson, but there was in her a musical gene, a good ear garnered from one of those unknown grandparents, which had coupled with Ray’s ordinary but enthusiastic talent (he’d once played drums) and together they’d produced Judy.

Felice sat at the piano and opened its lid. A long piece of wine-coloured felt ran the length and breadth of the keyboard. It was how the meticulous Judy protected its keys. The Fieldings—neighbours back in Medicine Hat when she was a child—had owned a piano, a Heintzman Baby Grand, which Mr. Fielding played. He had studied music in France before 1914. When the war began, he joined up and the army put him in the artillery. Three years of mud and cold and noise had broken his nerves, and perhaps his nerve too. He sold and tuned pianos in flat brittle southern Alberta, but his Heintzman, and the sumptuous rug he’d inherited from his mother, and the big fieldstone fireplace, all in the living room of his two-storey house, reminded him and his wife every day of elegance. They lived gentler than most.

Felice slid her hand under the felt and pressed two keys at once. They made a wide, empty sound. She added another key and pressed again. The new vibrations made texture and colour. She played the chord once more and wondered what its name was.

To name something was to know it. In her left hand she still held Ray’s gift book: a space to name things in.

The clock on the mantel struck two. Ray was at his office. Michael and Stephanie were both career people now, too. Successful children. Independent. They phoned or visited when they thought of it. All of which made her a successful mother; she had worked her way out of a job, withered away as if she were the State and the family was a Marxist society. She should have had a career too, she supposed, hired a housekeeper, made this house a cave where the clan gathered each night after they were through hunting. Her throat tightened and tears began. Along with the anger, tears had been with her often since the operation. You’ve had your children, Bill Morton had said, and far too many years of uncomfortable periods. This should be a relief to you. She wondered if he lost his balls, had them cut off, would he talk so cheerfully about having had his children so that now he could be relieved of lust. Because being able to have children, being vulnerable to a lust for them, was as much real for her as someone pretty and nubile must be for a man. She had succumbed to her temptation willingly. Even weeping and feeling sorry she knew that she hadn’t needed encouragement: she would have done it anyway. These tears always disoriented her, because they made her feel helpless and living in a place she didn’t want to be.

It was Thursday. In an hour Judy would be back. Perhaps from convalescent habit, her body signalled for sleep—a nap at least. She got up from the piano and walked to the stairs and up them to the master bedroom, whose view was north across Burrard Inlet to West Vancouver and the North Shore Mountains. She looked down on the water, and the freighters anchored there and at the boats sailing among them. Everything was familiar, as if the scene were a painting she viewed through the frame of this north window each afternoon when she came here to rest.

She lay down on the bed and pulled a comforter over her. A small cold pain began at that moment and, she thought, as if by prescription: Guts. She had fewer of them now, but she didn’t feel they had been simply removed; they felt amputated. She’d not been given notice that Morton was going to operate, and she’d not been ready to give them up. The ghosts of them were still there, fantasy parts that ached.

She remembered waking from the anaesthetic in the recovery room and asking how much Bill Morton had cut out of her.

Everything, the nurse had said, and it’s gone for biopsies.

She tried to stay conscious long enough to ask a question of this young woman in green whose hair was turbaned and whose sterile mask hung negligently beneath her chin. Did he get it all?

She thought she’d heard the nurse say, You shouldn’t ask that. But it had perhaps been her own mind speaking. For a moment, she’d felt the weight of the experts throughout her life—parents, teachers, doctors, government people, so many others—lean against her self-esteem and push her once more toward unconsciousness. Her ovaries, her uterus, those insane cancer cells: how much room in her had they taken up? What emptiness must she feel because Bill Morton had cut them out? Woman parts. She hadn’t chosen them.

I can ask.

Of course you can, my darling.

Ray’s voice. She’d opened her eyes again and had seen that she was in bed in a private room with a window through which the sun was shining too brightly. He leaned across its strong light and kissed her cheek, her forehead. There was raw pain at a little distance in her belly.

Ray, she said. I tried to ask if I’m all right. Am I?

He looked afraid too. He said, Of course you are.

People had reactions and didn’t always listen to what you needed. Ray sat straight on the edge of the bed. Her eyes still didn’t want to deal with strong light, but she tried to keep them open,I m not a woman anymore.

Yes you are.

Just a person. She heard her voice fading in her own ears, and she tried to look to see if Ray were able to hear her. His face was suddenly close again. His hair, beginning to grey, slanted across his forehead. There might have been tears on his cheeks. She thought that she wanted to put her fingers on them.

We’ll go somewhere, he said. When you’re well again. Just the two of us, another honeymoon. His voice had stopped, or perhaps that had been the moment when she’d gone unconscious once more.

Was this what Ray wanted written in her birthday book? Or did he—and maybe her children and grandchildren too—want just a summary, with very few guts spilled? Biography is moments. Selected. How much, in fact, does one remember, or somehow know without remembering?

Downstairs Judy arrived. Felice thought about getting up and going down to be with her. But it wasn’t Judy, it was Ray. He called to her from the bottom of the stairs and she told him to come up. He appeared almost immediately and closed their door behind him.

You’re very early, she said.

It’s my golf day.

Aren’t you going?

I thought I’d come home.

Hubert cancelled?

He shook his head. Did you see Morton?

Yes.

Is everything okay?

She gave him a laugh and held out her hand and he took it. You’ve been very patient. It’s been a long time.

He lay down beside her. I’m not into the male menopause yet. He grinned.

Not at your age. She kissed him, and said, Beginning again is scary.

He nodded. I know. He got up on his elbow and leaned over her. Did you talk with Morton about it?

No, but he did. He said, You can have intercourse now if you want."’

That’s all?

Yes.

How do you feel about it?

Earlier today I thought I’d tell you tonight. She felt herself beginning to laugh. But here you are now.

You’re afraid it’ll do damage?

No. That— She stopped and waited for the right words and a little more courage.

What?

That I won’t be juicy anymore. She looked away at the ceiling.

I didn’t come home for sex, he said.

Didn’t you?

No.

But I want to know if I’m okay, she told him.

He smiled down at her.

She said, Judy’s going to be home any minute. Lock our door.

He got up, still smiling. Reminds me of how we felt our first time.

Nothing, she said, should ever remind you of our first time. I felt like we were the only ones in the world who’d waited till after the wedding. She sat on the edge of the bed and began to undress.

I don’t think so, he said.

She heard him lock the door and begin to take his clothes off: Why did you come home then? She stood up. He didn’t answer. She was naked and the scar down the length of her belly was a red ridge. Ugly. She looked up from it. He was standing in front of her and for a moment she felt this wasn’t them having sex; it was something medical, an experiment.

She let him put his arms around her, and she wondered if she were going to cry. His erection lay up along. the scar. It felt good. Please, she said, and laughed a little.

She let him ease her down across the bed. She liked her body against his. It was going to be fine now that it was starting to happen again. She felt tears of relief begin and reached down between her legs and helped him push slow up into her.

It feels so damned good, he said.

She held her breath. Yes, But not all the way just yet. And then after a while she wanted him to do whatever he must to help her come, and he did and came too, and she thought it was only the textures inside of her that felt a little different. Less elastic. Surfaces harder. Maybe Morton had tightened things up in there. She had no muscles yet to hold him with, and there was a small pain beginning where she knew there was only emptiness. That was lovely, she said, and after a hug she let him go.

He lay beside her, on his elbow again. No pain?

I’m still greedy, she said.

Want to come again? He began a gentle massage with his fingers.

She shook her head. Yes, always, but I think we better not.

He took his hand away, Slam bam.

I think we both wanted to see quick whether it still worked. She kissed him and waited. He nodded and smiled, and after a while she said, What was it you came home for then?

Kelsey has the whole thing booked. He’s even found a ship from Montreal to Gdynia for us.

Gdynia?

It’s a Polish ship, and Gdynia is its home port.

Not Gdansk?

That’s next door, I think.

Where that man—?

Walesa.

Solidarity?

Yes.

What if I’m not ready for Poland?

Who is?

Then why are we going?

Ben’s going there. When will we have a chance again to see behind the Iron Curtain? He lay back beside her.

She knew there was more. She rolled up on her elbow and looked down into his eyes. His hand played against her skin along her arm and then across her breasts. It’s going to be good again, she said. Maybe she wouldn’t weep anymore. There was at least this physical joy to use as ground on which to rebuild herself.

It’s good already, he said.

She relaxed against him, and after a moment asked the question she thought he wanted to hear. How do we go to Poland?

June 18th we fly to Toronto and pick up our visas from the Polish Consulate. From there we take the train to Montreal. See Ontario, a bit of it, why not? We never have. Then the ship from Montreal on the 22nd. We have a day in London, just a few hours really, and the same in Rotterdam. We dock in Gdynia July 5th.

It’s a slow boat.

Deliberately I think. It’s a cruise as much as it is a trip.

There are so many things to think about. He didn’t say anything, and she hadn’t expected that. Judy, she said, starting at the top of an immediate list.

Judy’s twenty-one, he said. She’ll make a fine house-sitter for us.

I suppose. She watched him watching her. He had always been such a manager, and she didn’t have to ask why or how their lives together had turned out the way they had: the children, the house, the garden, the cars, the clubs for tennis, sailing, golf, the Hawaii Christmases.

I got our passports back today, he said.

She could feel him wanting to say more. And what else?

I want to close the office till middle of September.

Poland for three months?

No, Europe too.

She lay back with her head on the pillow again. She’d never thought about going to Europe. England, perhaps, but not Europe proper. Poland wasn’t simply Poland; it was a visit to Beth and Ben’s house in another country. So she said, What have you planned? She knew that was the right question, a good place to start, because along with being the provider he liked also to be the planner. He’d ordered the ketch from Gardiner, the naval architect, before he’d suggested it might be a good idea to have a bigger sailboat. He loved surprises. He had always simply arrived home with new cars. Ray, you can’t just—

You can choose too. He sat up quickly, caught out and wanting to give her assurance.

Choose what?

Countries.

No, it’s too much. She sat up too.

We don’t have to do it. But we can talk. He got up off the bed and found a map in his jacket pocket. Come on, Eff, just think about it. Do you like the idea? We’ll get a Eurailpass and travel anywhere we want.

There’s so much to Europe, she said, carefully.

Downstairs, she heard Judy come in. There was someone with her. She reached for her clothes.

Ray spread the map out on the bed. Ben’s family doesn’t join him until the middle of summer, so we’ll be company for him in his new house. Then we can take the train to Vienna. After that, anything you want. His hand swept the map.

She could see Italy, Spain, England at the edges of Europe.

After Vienna, there’s Venice, Florence- He stopped and grinned foolish up at her.

Go ahead, she told him, still exasperated. Where else?

No. You. You say. I’m sorry about this. I only thought about it today. I was looking out the window between patients, and I thought, Why the hell hurry through a month’s holiday?

Which explains the slow boat.

Yes, we’d have to fly if we only had a month. I thought you might twig and ask about it.

You said Kelsey had booked everything.

Just to Poland, Eff.

She went to her vanity and sat down to comb out her hair and then gather it up again. She tried saying, Greece, Spain, France? but the names didn’t give her any sense of making a real choice. She left her hair down and got up again.

Sardinia, she said, and laughed at the idiocy of it, and watched him put his finger near the two large islands west of Italy. She went to the bed and looked down at the map. The southern island was Sardinia. On the map it was set in a blue sea, rectangular, and with small islands of its own along its northeastern coast and also facing Corsica—where Napoleon had come from. She knew of no one who’d come from Sardinia.

Okay. Ray laughed, but when he spoke again his voice sounded businesslike, as if he’d concluded that a patient needed a root canal. We’ll do Sardinia. And that was settled.

Felice felt numb, and wished there was someone else to talk to. Maybe Judy. I’ve got to think about this, Ray. She heard her voice formal, as if she were about to reply to an arranged marriage.

Sure, he said. Of course. He folded up the map. I’ll have my shower and then we can have a drink, in the garden if it’s warm enough.

Judy’s home. She gestured toward the door. Someone’s with her. Maybe I can make them coffee. She saw him looking uncertain and went close to him. Thank you for the lovely afternoon.

Don’t mention it. He made a bland face. Next time I’m in town I’ll give you a call.

Please. She kissed him, and went out of the room to the top of the stairs.

It occurred to her quite suddenly there that what had just happened had been good, but it was only sex. Until last February there had always been more to it than skin and scintillation: the part of her that was feminine had been aroused then, and during the moment before climax, when everything threatened to be just physical, it had been the woman in her who had taken over. Beyond the fooling around and the seductive talk—we are all four-year-olds sexually, elder daughter, Stephanie, being wise, had said recently—beyond playing and revelling, there’d always been the woman at stake saying yes and coming hard.

She sat on the top stair and looked down into the light below where the young musicians were preparing to play. If she’d thought to bring Ray’s birthday book with her from the bedroom, she could write something in it now—the beginning of an explanation for Judy who, more than Michael and Stephanie, had always found her a puzzle.

Your mother was once a person who lived, not by woman-ness (those qualities thought by men to be womanly) but for her own womanhood. It feels now, looking back empty, not to have been a choice but a fate—physical, as fate always is to begin with—which at the birth of Michael became a revelation . . .

But what was the use of notes about life? Write them down and you give the past too much importance, make it heavier than the future so that life slopes upward, unbalanced, curious, even terrifying. She found she was weeping again. Those parts Bill Morton had cut out had accounted for, defined her own past, and now it was the future that felt heavy. Life slanted down. Not just down but also out. Into space, where she must, she was beginning to understand, create another life. To give up something basic, a thing that defines you, is to die, because the old meaning that life had is gone. What is left is breath, a heartbeat, useless memories and a grief that was right now causing these tears.

Some women, Morton had told her, are only too happy to have done with being in pain and always fearful of getting pregnant.

Maybe they had other lives to help re-define themselves. She had been wrong to give herself up to her husband, children, house. She wondered what it was that had supported her need to do that? Judy’s word for it was oppression. But it was hard for her to think of Ray as an oppressor, or to think of their children and their life together as a result of it.

All of this had been forced up because she’d had sex again. It was too much to think about. To go on thinking about. And it was nothing that she wanted to write down in Ray’s book. What was going on in her head had to come out and be lived, and if she were lucky that would define her. She wiped her eyes with the backs of her hands and then the sleeves of her cardigan. The music that was coming from below was unknown to her. Judy’s friend was a clarinetist. Felice concentrated on one thing at a time: the piano, then the clarinet, the music and the fact that Judy had never had a clarinetist to the house before. She stood up and put her hand on the banister. For her, the clarinet was male.

But when she arrived at the bottom of the stairs, she saw that Judy’s colleague was a young woman. She wore oxfords, charcoal grey pants, a black blouse and had black hair cut like a helmet. She couldn’t see her face, and only that part of the clarinet where her fingers played on it. Her tone was flat, classical, and her technique professional. The music was brilliant, fast, with surprises all along its melody line.

Then her presence was sensed. The clarinet halted, and the young woman turned around. Judy stopped playing too, and stood up. She was perhaps four inches taller than her friend: a small figure stretched over a long frame and heavier than she should be around the hips and along the thighs. Stephanie had got what dainty genes were available.

Mother, this is Bella Francesco. I don’t think you’ve met.

Felice moved toward them and held out her hand. You’re new, she said.

Bella looked surprised. No. Just new here. She shook Felice’s hand, not so much self-contained as distant.

This year we’ve been assigned to do our end-of-term exam piece together.

You’re sounding good already, Felice said.

Bella turned away to the music on her stand beside the piano and blew a soft tone somewhere near the middle of her instrument, and then a run that ended on a high wrong note. It said something impatient and dismissive.

Felice looked at Judy and said, I’m sorry I interrupted.

Don’t be sorry. Judy reached out to the piano’s music rack and picked up two small blue booklets and an envelope. Dad left these here. Your passports. She opened one, laughing. What a shock. My mother’s not Felice at all. She’s Phyllis. She laughed again and came out from behind the piano. Bella blew another note and looked at them both as she might at unwelcome outsiders.

Judy said, See? Right here. Maiden name, Phyllis Irene Borden. And here’s your married name, Felice Gentry. What happened?

Felice took both passports from her. Judy was still young in ways that often hurt. I changed it, she told her. Your music’s wonderful. Why don’t you play some more?

I changed my name, too, Bella said, suddenly.

When? Judy asked, surprised.

When I knew who I was.

Or who you didn’t want to be anymore, Felice said.

I suppose, Bella said. She turned again to her music.

Judy looked bewildered. Well, it was a shock. Why didn’t you tell me?

I think I’d almost forgotten. She smiled parental support and encouragement at her, and added, I’ll listen from the garden where I won’t bother you.

She didn’t watch Judy go back to her piano. Instead, she turned and walked through the living room and out onto the patio. Then she looked at the passport. Ray had gotten her to sign the passport application and her photos, and then he’d done the rest himself. In the envelope were copies of letters from Bill Morton and their lawyer, Stanley Lower, saying they’d known her for twenty-five years as Felice Gentry.

And her birth certificate was in the envelope too. She looked at it, a very simple document with her father’s name, her mother’s and Phyllis Irene Borden’s, born at 6:33 a. m. March 24th, 1933 in Medicine Hat, Alberta. Ray had known that was her name, even though she’d been Felice for three years before they’d met. Her mother had told him when she’d first brought him home. She’d laughed, embarrassed, because she’d looked as if she’d not intended to give way to a disloyal urge to tell him, "This is not

Felice you’re going to marry, it’s Phyllis." What had Ray replied? She neither recalled nor knew without remembering. He may only have smiled and nodded. From then until both her mother and father were dead, he had treated them as if they were, say, radiations rather than actual people. He liked strangers, but that was his way of treating anyone he had not chosen to be an integral part of his life—his in-laws, professors, patients, fellow board members at the yacht, golf and tennis clubs, sometimes even his own children. But he had chosen her. Felice.

Her mother had named her Phyllis for an aged, well-off aunt, but it had only been a hopeful gesture. The old woman had died within the year and left everything to her lawyer son. Phyllis had grown through the Depression and then, suddenly conscious, had seen the war come and had watched their small city with the funny name become nearly empty of grown men. They left in bunches during the fall of 1939, the year she began school, and until she was twelve she watched the high school graduate new recruits for the navy, army and air force.

The war for everyone was a world turned over. It happened even to her. That upside down world was for her a set of twins who’d been evacuated from England. They were the children of cousins of the Fieldings, older than she was and more interesting than anyone she’d met before: Pamela and Brittany were their names.

They were self-contained, a unit. Or, perhaps they were a sea-creature—one that floated with its own tides, somewhat benign, but which absorbed what it needed from around it in order to live. Phyllis had been absorbed. She was part of them; or, more accurately, she was a part that was not quite them, a part which gave Pam and Brittany definition in this new place they found themselves because of the war. For herself, Phyllis thought of them as something of her own outside of her home where she served her mother and was quiet for her father and dressed and spoke as they both wanted her to, especially on Sundays.

The twins were a small transition from her place to somewhere other. Different, but the same: she served them too, not quite in the way she did her parents, but still the idea was there. What Pam and Brittany wanted from her was her malleable self. She was seldom Phyllis Borden when she was with them. They gave her