"
Otherwise he was room 306 to her, no trouble. It was not until Thursday, when he asked her for a job, that she subjected him to closer scrutiny. "What kind of job,
But she was already on the alert. She caught his glance and renewed her impression of a man separate from the many. Perhaps too separate. She examined his shirt and decided it was the one he had been wearing when he arrived. Another prospector has gambled his last dollar, she thought. At least we haven't been paying for his meals.
"Any job," he replied.
"But there are many jobs in Esperance, Jacques." Madame Latulipe objected.
"I've tried them," said Jonathan, looking back on three days of Gallic shrugs or worse. "I tried the restaurants, the hotels, the boatyard and the lake marinas. I tried four mines, two logging companies, the cement works, two gas stations and the paper mill. They didn't like me either."
"But why not? You are very beautiful, very sensitive. Why do they not like you, Jacques?"
"They want papers. My social insurance number. Proof of Canadian citizenship. Proof I'm a landed immigrant."
"And you don't have these? None? You are too aesthetic?"
"My passport's with the immigration authorities in Ottawa. It's being processed. They wouldn't believe me. I'm Swiss," he added, as if that explained their incredulity.
But by then Madame Latulipe had pushed the button for her husband.
Andre Latulipe had been born not Latulipe but Kviatkovski. It was only when his wife inherited the hotel from her father that he had consented to change his name to hers for the sake of perpetuating a branch of the Esperance nobility. He was a first-generation immigrant with a cherub's face and a broad, blank forehead and a mane of premature white hair. He was small and stocky and as fidgety as men become at fifty when they have worked themselves nearly to death and start to wonder why. As a child, Andrzej Kviatkovski had been hidden in cellars and smuggled over snowy mountain passes at dead of night. He had been held and questioned and released. He knew what it was to stand in front of uniforms and pray. He glanced at Jonathan's room bill and was impressed, as his wife had been, that it comprised no extra charges. A swindler would have used the telephone, signed tabs at the bar and in the restaurant. The Latulipes had had a few swindlers in their day, and that was what they did.
The bill still in his hand, Latulipe looked Jonathan slowly up and down, much as his wife had done before him, but with insight: at his wanderer's brown boots, scuffed but mysteriously clean; at his hands, small and workmanlike, held respectfully to his sides; at his trim stance and harrowed features and the spark of desperation in the eyes. And Monsieur Latulipe was moved to kinship by the sight of a man fighting for a toehold in a better world.
"What can you do?" he asked.
"Cook," said Jonathan.
He had joined the family. And Yvonne.
* * *
She knew him immediately: yes. It was as if, through the agency of her appalling mother, signals that might have taken months to exchange were transmitted and received in a second.
"This is Jacques, our very
And you are Yvonne, he thought, with a mysterious shedding of shame.
A desk stood at the centre of the floor. A wooden reading lamp lit one side of her face. She was typing, and when she knew it was her mother she continued typing to the end, so that Jonathan had to endure the tension of looking at a mop of untidy fair hair until she chose to lift her head. A single bed was shoved along the wall. Stacked baskets of laundered bed sheets took up the remaining space. There was order, but there were no keepsakes and no photographs. Just a sponge bag by the handbasin, and on the bed a lion with a zipper down its tummy for her nightdress. For a sickening moment it reminded Jonathan of Sophie's slaughtered Pekingese. I killed the dog too, he thought.
"Yvonne is our family genius,
"And she types," said Jonathan, God alone knew why.
