The Opposite of Chance by Margaret Hermes

Author:Margaret Hermes
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Delphinium Books
Published: 2021-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

Everything Changes Now

11.

When Betsy got off the train in Le Havre, she felt like a character in a Dickens novel, much buffeted about by fate and in imminent need of a deus ex machina. Arriving at the harbor after dark, she squeezed past the leering hulk blocking the doorway of the merchant marine hotel and prayed she had landed in Dickens rather than Mickey Spillane. It was too late to leave the wharf area to look for more hospitable lodgings. She hadn’t seen a single taxi in the last half hour anyway.

Once in her room, with the dubious blanket removed to the dresser and the straight-back chair wedged under the handle of the door, she sniffed the pillow before taking pen to paper to try to convey to her sister the present assault on all her senses and sensibilities. The waft of oil thinned with brine. The moan of a foghorn and slurp of waves lapping against the docks. The featureless warehouses drained of all color, their skins peeled away by recurrent salt mists. The steel wool feel of the stained blanket. The man in the room opposing hers sitting astride a straight-back chair, bare-chested, suspenders hanging, staring out his open door into the hallway. It was the first time in her travels that she wished herself back in Milwaukee, but she would not tell her sister that.

She also wouldn’t report that the middle-aged Italian hotelkeeper she had written about so condescendingly in her previous letter had cast her out. Even though she could tell both her sister and herself that nothing had happened between them, she felt soiled. And then disposed of. She let the paper and pen slip to the floor.

That night, as she had searched near the docks for a place to sleep until the ferry’s morning departure for Rosslare, she had seen only men—stevedores, sailors, wharf rats—slouching on and off the piers, smoking against buildings, and later, in varying stages of undress, passing between their grim cells in the merchant marine hotel and the fish-foul water closet at the end of the hall. And then there was the skeletal little man with the scar across his chin who had pocketed her francs and led her up the complaining, ill-lit stairs to a room that lacked both a number and a working lock. When she had held out her hand for the key, he shrugged and retreated down the steps. “Le clef, s’il vous plaît?” she called after him several times, her voice rising in mounting panic until she realized she was only alerting the rest of the floor to her vulnerability.

Her vulnerability.

What had happened to her in Cernobbio? And what had almost happened?

She had kept on the move since she boarded the steamer that took her away from the Albergo Giannino. Now she was not only stationary, she wasn’t sure she’d ever get to leave this place, at least not upright. She would have said she was petrified, but that suggested that her insides had turned to stone instead of to liquid.

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