Devotion Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Epigraph

  The Accident

  Stefania, Isador

  William’s Recovery

  Love at First Sight

  Room 334

  Things Said in Sleep

  Room 334

  Letter

  The Veterinarian

  Daring Nighttime Robbery

  Swans in the House

  Wedding in Nova Scotia (1985)

  Honeymoon

  Skywritten

  A Phrase Favored by Her Mother

  The Swankeeper

  Read More from Howard Norman

  About the Author

  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: l
iars. 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 I can come up with just now is, he might sound like the actor Peter Lorre.”

  “I know what you mean,” David said.

  “Just to utter a word or two may take a long time. Much effort. He won’t have to use an electronic enhancer—that’s what we call it. You’ve no doubt seen people holding amplifiers to their throats in order to be heard. That’s positive news. He might retain a polyphonic aspect.”

  “Meaning?”

  “It would be like, oh, I don’t know, a ventriloquist without a dummy, but still managing two voices. Things will change over time, as his voice attempts the right calibration. I must warn you, Mr. Kozol, there’s an outside chance the voice disappears altogether. We can’t predict. We don’t have the science for it. Mr. Field will need extensive voice therapy. The reasonable hope is that, given time, people will be able to understand him without difficulty.”

  “His other injuries?”

  “Extensive. Four cracked ribs, fractured left arm. We’re monitoring closely for internal bleeding and the like. But we think he’ll do well on the mend. The pelvic bone’s quite shattered. He won’t need a new hip. But it’s still a long road home.”

  William was sixty-one. Still broad-shouldered, he was just shy of six feet tall. He had white hair cut short, white eyebrows (his hair had turned completely white after the accident), deep crow’s-feet at the corners of his dark blue eyes, tight smile and often a day or two’s growth of white whiskers. “Your father’s a man of substance and poise,” Janice once said, rather objectively, to Maggie when she was fifteen. “Also witty and a good mind and something of a stormy temper, though I have to say, the storm usually stays offshore. Still, you can see it brewing. You’re aware of it.”

  He was born and raised in Edinburgh, and lived there up until the age of nineteen. After a year of technical school in Boston, he returned to Scotland, where he worked as a tradesman—bricklayer, carpenter and occasional dairyman. At the age of thirty-three, on a sojourn to Gairloch to look at the cliffs and soaring sea birds, he met Janice McNeill and six months later they married there. They kept a small flat in Edinburgh, where Janice apprenticed in bookbinding. One day a letter from a Scottish friend living in Halifax included a one-paragraph advertisement for a caretaker’s position, published in the Halifax Herald. The friend, Richard, wrote: “Patricia and I took it upon ourselves to motor out to a lovely little village called Parrsboro and speak on your behalf to the owners, named Stefania and Isador Tecosky. We sang your praises and they were interested. So there, we’ve put in a good word and here’s their telephone exchange. They are of the Hebrew persuasion. What’s more, as blessed fate would have it, somehow after the war they landed on Islay out in the Hebrides! And that’s the very reason they need a caretaker, because they’re determined to return to Islay to live now.”

  After reading this letter, and without further need of encouragement except their own sense of possibility, William and Janice stayed up the entire
night, drinking coffee and whiskey, talking about a new life. At dinner the following evening they made their first transcontinental telephone call. The conversation took about fifteen minutes. The Tecoskys agreed to provide airplane tickets (“A surprising amount of faith and generosity for just one telephone call,” William commented), and a month later picked up William and Janice at the airport in Halifax.

  The Fields took up temporary residence in the guesthouse. With their little savings, Janice straightaway bought tools and materials, and with the Tecoskys’ permission repaired a few of the worse-for-wear books in the library, including a volume of Heinrich Heine’s poems and, as Janice remarked to William in bed, “sacred Hebrew prayer books.” In 1956 there were only eleven swans in residence. Over the next two weeks William demonstrated that he could handle these birds. He also oversaw the complicated task of installing a new septic system, replaced rotted sections of the wraparound porch’s railing, took care of other odds and ends, some assigned by Isador, others suggested by himself.

  William and Janice had not yet set foot in the main house; Stefania had delivered the dilapidated books to the front door only. But at the beginning of their third week at the estate, Isador invited them for coffee and raisin scones made by Dory Elliot. Before sitting down to talk, Stefania offered a tour of the house. The guest bedroom was on the first floor, along with the living room, dining room and kitchen, with its spacious pantry. On the dining room wall were two small oil paintings by Chaim Soutine, one of a fish, another of a garden near Paris. Neither Janice nor William had heard of this artist. Stefania took great pains to discourse on Soutine’s life, saying, “He was a great Jewish painter” and “He died after surgery in 1943 in Paris.” She loaned them a book of Soutine’s paintings, which they looked at that same night. The library, which was adjacent to the dining room, had floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and a rolling ladder.