The Foreigner

David Plante was born in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1940. He is the author of one book of non-fiction, Difficult Women, and several novels, including The Ghost of Henry James, Slides and Figures in Bright Air. The Family, the first part of his magnificent trilogy about a family of working-class French-Canadians, The Francoeur Family, was nominated for the 1979 National Book Award. His most recent novel is The Catholic. A regular contributor to the New York Times and the New Yorker, he lives in London. DAVID PLANTE The Foreigner TRIAD PALADIN GRAFTON BOOKS LONDON GLASGOW TORONTO SYDNEY AUCKLAND Triad/Paladin Grafton Books 8 Grafton Street, London W1X 3LA Published by Triad/Paladin 1987 Triad Paperbacks Ltd is an imprint of Chatto, Bodley Head & Jonathan Cape Ltd and Grafton Books, A Division of the Collins Publishing Group First published in Great Britain by Chatto & Windus. The Hogarth Press 1984 Portions of this book have previously appeared in the New Yorker. I wish to thank the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation for its support. Copyright © David Plante 1984 ISBN 0-586-08606-4 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Collins, Glasgow Set in Ehrhardt All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. For Catharine Carver 'In Spain you could not tell about anything.' Ernest Hemingway Part I 1 I was brought up in two countries. The outer country, vast, was America. I belonged to another, a small one within the large: the French parish, in Providence, Rhode Island, into which I was born. The small French parish had no rights in America, which really had rights over me. I was frightened of America, and one day, all by myself, I tore up the American flag. I was also frightened of the French Church, so frightened I knew I would have condemned myself if I had dared desecrate any of its dark totems: a missal, a rosary, a sheaf of blessed palm. These objects of the French Church could save me only within myself. I had to concentrate on them while I prayed. American objects exposed me to a dangerous outside which demanded my attention whether I liked it or not. I had no faith in what was outside, and I couldn't in any way fix on the American flag to pray. But America, whether I liked it or not, would take me out of myself, to where there was no salvation, and destroy me. Trying to fantasize what it would be to live in another country, I'd stop myself and think: you phony. Whenever I was asked by friends in college what my nationality was, I would answer, 'French.' On all the forms I had to fill out, whenever I saw Nationality, I would write French. It meant blood, but 'French' did not mean 'coming from France.' In the parish, France, as a country, was hardly referred to, and I had no more sense of it than I had of England or Italy or Spain. It belonged, with those other countries, to Europe. My parents had no idea when their ancestors left from France for Canada, or from what part. One of my aunts mentioned a great great aunt who arrived in Quebec possessing only a pair of lace gloves and an ivory fan, and that was all we knew. France, that distant country, was not our old country. II We came from French Canada, and at the beginning of every day in the parish school, we sang, '0 Canada, te