Devotion: A Novel

Copyright © 2007 by Howard Norman

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

www.hmhbooks.com

The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

Norman, Howard A.

Devotion / Howard Norman.

p. cm.

ISBN-13: 978-0-618-73541-9

ISBN-10: 0-618-73541-0

1 Fathers-in-law—Fiction. 2. Fathers and daughters—

Fiction. 3. Husband and wife—Fiction. 4. Nova Scotia—Fiction. 5. Domestic fiction. 1. Title.

PR9199.3.N564D48 2007

813'.54—dc22 2006023454

eISBN 978-0-547-56174-5

v2.0513

for David M.

I thank Melanie Jackson and Jane Rosenman for their close reading and encouragement.

H.N.

Devotion is a thing that demands motives.

—ANATOLE FRANCE

The Accident

HERE IS what happened. In London on the morning of August 19, 1985, David Kozol and his father-in-law, William Field, had a violent quarrel on George Street. In a café they came to blows. Two waitresses threw them out. On the sidewalk they started up again. William stumbled backward from the curb and was struck by a taxi. The London police record called it assault by mutual affray.

This took place eleven months ago. In the intervening time David replaced William as caretaker of the Tecosky estate, near Parrsboro, Nova Scotia, on the north shore of the Bay of Fundy. William had been recovering in the main house.

Now it is near dusk on July 13, 1986. David, dressed in khaki shorts and a black T-shirt, barefoot, followed a line of nineteen swans with clipped wings up from the spring-fed pond. He wondered if there was such a word as swanherd. He enjoyed watching each swan’s awkward, comical swagger. The summer had been one relentless heat wave. David said out loud, A swan walked right up and bit me in a park when I was eleven, in Vancouver. Maybe one of your distant cousins. Who knows? Once David got the swans inside their pen and double-latched the gate, he walked across the lawn, wet from a fleeting late-afternoon cloudburst, the first rain in a month. Leaving footprints on the kitchen’s checkerboard linoleum floor, he walked to the counter and reheated coffee. He sat at the kitchen table and continued reading The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard by Anatole France, the book William’s daughter, Maggie, was reading when David had seen her for the first time.

Before he met Maggie, David had fallen off reading novels. Yet he purchased nine novels by Anatole France, each a small leather-bound copy, on a single visit to the Antiquarian Muse, a used-book shop in Truro, a forty-five-minute drive east from the estate on Route 2. In June he read The Queen Pedauque and Penguin Island, often staying up through the night. Actually, he did not have the concentration or critical wherewithal to measure his level of engagement with a given novel; he only knew they kept him connected to Maggie, who, as William said, is still your wife on paper. His reading tastes generally did not run to such philosophically leavened plots, or such noble sentiments as the forces of my soul in revolt. Yet he had written those very words out on a piece of paper, admitting they corresponded to how he felt since the accident.

The guesthouse consisted of a kitchen, a small sitting room, a bedroom, and a utility room. It had a sloped roof with black shingles. On the fireplace mantel in the sitting room was a 1950s Grundig-Majestic turntable. David stacked records on the floor. He had come to rely on Bach’s suites for unaccompanied cello, performed by the Hungarian Janos Starker. This was a utilitarian choice. David knew he was in a bad state, that every day he had to consciously work himself up to melancholy. Somehow the Bach compositions assisted in this. They allowed, as Anatole France had written of an acquaintance, splendid companionship: my self-inflicted torment, his stark spirit. David drank too much coffee while reading. Worked his heartbeat to Morse code. What might the message be, besides not to drink so much coffee? He could not read it, an illiterate at reading his own heart.

He set down The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard in order to write in his notebook. It was 3 A.M. He had come to think of it as an if only notebook. If only Maggie and I had flown back together from our honeymoon to Halifax; if only, when I saw Katrine Novak in front of Durrants Hotel in London, I had ordered my taxi to continue on past; if only I hadn’t allowed Katrine Novak up to my hotel room, William would not have found me out; if only I hadn’t chased William, down George Street, he would not have been almost killed by a taxi...

The strange thing about this notebook was that David believed everything he wrote at the moment he wrote it. Later the truth always sank in. Although he was mollified for half an hour or more by filling pages with these solipsistic equations of remorse, he finally knew that no ordering or reordering of events could save him from the effects of his own folly. Small things led to big damages—or something like that. He had badly screwed up; the steep price exacted was the ceaseless reminder of Maggie’s absence. It flummoxed and pained him that his wife was not locatable, a situation he had, of course, brought on himself. He literally did not know, day to day, month to month, where she was in the world. Most likely Halifax, where she kept an apartment, but possibly somewhere in Europe, where her work occasionally took her. She was publicity director of the Dalhousie Ensemble, a faculty-student classical-music group consisting of twelve players, from Dalhousie University. His father-in-law William always knew Maggie’s whereabouts, but was not telling.

He marked his place in the novels with a leather bookmark borrowed from the library in the main house. He kept The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard on the kitchen table. The others were in a pile on the counter next to the bread boards. My Friend’s Book, The Red Lily, A Mummer’s Tale, The Gods Are Athirst, Manuscript of a Village Doctor, Patroologica. He was grateful that Anatole France had written so many. He read by a floor lamp set next to the table. On the most sweltering of nights, if he managed to sleep at all, he did so in a chaise longue on the screen porch off the sitting room. He set up electric table fans for a cross-breeze. Often there was a mist so dense he could not see his own feet or hands when, guided by the swans’ muttering, he walked to the pen and fed them dry kernels of corn. Their bills jabbed the palm of his hand, but they only meant to take what was unexpectedly offered, a kind of midnight snack.

Stefania, Isador

LOCALLY, it was known as the Tecosky estate. It consisted of 248 acres. There were few private estates of comparable size in Nova Scotia, but there was a larger one near Mabou, along the Northumberland Strait on Cape Breton. The owners of the Tecosky estate were Mr. Isador and Mrs. Stefania Tecosky, Polish Jews who had miraculously navigated the terrors of their century (Well, it was a miracle, wasn’t it? Stefania had said. What else could it be called, good fortune? Fortunes are for fortunetellers: liars. History is survived—that’s all there is to it.) and forged a route no more or less unlikely than that of any other immigrant Jew who had entered Canada, as they had after World War II. Stefania had said, One meaning of the word ‘diaspora’ is ‘happy to be anywhere alive at all.’

In 1986 both Isador and Stefania were seventy-seven years of age. Their permanent residence was on Islay—pronounced Eye-la—in the Scottish Hebrides. Many people who lived in Parrsboro and the neighboring villages of Upper Economy, Economy, Lower Economy, and Great Village referred to the Tecoskys as very educated people. Dory Elliot, who owned Minas Bakery in Parrsboro, had said to David, I miss them. They had those accents, Stefania and Izzy. It made English something different, eh? And they’d been through things in Europe gives a person nightmares even to hear about them. Nice people. Good people. Not church people of the local denomination. They knew good books and paintings and history. The elementary school in Great Village had them in as guest speakers any number of times. But they didn’t bandy it about. They never overly kept to themselves nor come into town every day, and that’s the way it is with lots of people around here, isn’t it?

David had his own deep affection for Stefania and Izzy. He had got much biographical information about them from Maggie, who considered them grandparents. And he’d got certain things firsthand when he and Maggie stayed in the Port Charles Hotel on Islay during their honeymoon. The Tecoskys’ house was nearby, on Upper Loch Indaal. We’ve come to love Islay, Isador said one afternoon at tea. "We can’t possibly consider Poland home, though we were born there. Stefania always wanted to live by the sea, but this Scottish island? Plenty of swans, plenty of sea birds, plenty of open space, but no synagogue! That’s our little joke. After the war we wandered two years. Scotland was the first to take us in. We never forget this. Not for one day do we forget this. Memory and prayer, what else is there for us at this age? Do you see photographs of any children on our tables? No. No children. Our final resting place will be Nova Scotia. We agree on this. Many Jews went to Halifax when the war ended, through Pier 21. There were many helpful Jewish organizations waiting. In 1948 we purchased two cemetery plots in Halifax. We love Islay, but we’ll finally rest in Halifax. Who could have predicted such a thing?"

In late May of 1986 the Tecoskys had visited the estate. They had come specifically to look in on William. Worried as they were about his condition. During their weeklong stay David received compliments on his upkeep of the five-bedroom main house. Each morning they had breakfast with William in his bedroom, the largest on the ground floor. David brought them tea, toast, butter, jam, and slices of melon on a tray, and left the room. Late morning, Stefania and Isador took the first of two daily naps in the master bedroom upstairs.

On their last day at the estate, David brought back the swans from the children’s zoo in Halifax. The Tecoskys had waited to see this. In late autumn and winter, the swans, each identified by a thin leather collar with numbered metal tag, were featured in the indoor exhibit, which had heated pools. In exchange, the Tecoskys’ swans were kept to their accustomed diet and had a pool separate from the permanent ducks, geese, and loons. Also, Parrsboro’s veterinarian, Naomi Bloor, whom Stefania and Isador much admired and trusted, was allowed a monthly appraisal of the swans’ health, paid for by the Tecoskys. Naomi kept a precise itemization of her expenses—gas receipts, hotel bill—on the rare occasions when she had to stay overnight in Halifax, plus the regular bill for her services.

David drove up in the estate’s Dodge pickup, specially fitted with padded trailer sides and a wire cage. He let the swans loose. They headed directly for the pond, distributing themselves in four preening armadas. Their statuesque beauty. Each of their heads forming an elegant cursive’S. The invisible rudders of their feet. Since they can’t fly, Isador said, this is their great moment of freedom, I always think.

They all three watched the swans a while. I’m remembering, just now, Stefania said. When I was a girl, swans—from where, who knows? Norway or Sweden possibly. As a girl they would fly over my village.

William’s Recovery

WILLIAM RECOVERED at a steady, impressive rate, his doctor had said. This was Dr. Rasmussen, at the hospital in Truro. Rasmussen had received all of William’s medical information from London and took over. Thirty years earlier he had delivered Maggie. He was an old-style general practitioner, their family doctor. Even though she lived in Halifax, Maggie continued to consult with Dr. Rasmussen and get his second opinion on any small concern she ran past her Halifax physician, covered by Dalhousie’s insurance policy.

William underwent surgery in London on August 21, 1985, which took the better part of seven hours. Before Maggie had arrived from Halifax the day after the accident, the surgeon, Dr. Moore, spoke to David about William’s condition. His larynx is the biggest problem, he said. He had just stepped from the operating room and was exhausted. They stood in the waiting room. "His voice might return, but it won’t be the same voice. The best