I’ve found steam, swirling hot waters of the whirlpool, and penetrating heat of a sauna. And I’ve found society. I do not think I mislead my mother too far when I describe the society at the pool on Rue de la Gauchetière. It does bear a certain resemblance to taking the waters at Bath.

The bodies.

Something soothes me about those bodies, all shapes: indolent, quick, wiry, lard-fat, slow or electric, everyone’s guard down. There is one man, blind and dressed in yellow, whose seeing-eye dog waits, ever so patient, beside his glowing pile of clothes while he showers. None of us has to pretend uprightness or strength. I delight in freckles, pot-bellies, undulating buttocks. I loved that about Bath as well. Both places give me uncustomary pride in my own weird shape.

Why is it that, naked, I lose my strangeness among men?

When I wore the red coat, those who loved me found ways to assure me it mattered not that I possessed gangling calves or was chinless. My brother, Ned, and my beloved friend George Warde insisted I appeared not at all like an orange mop on stilts. My mother comforted me all the time about my chin.

At the Chinatown Y, as in Bath, the steam releases our tension. We emerge bright-skinned and lithe, even the blind man slowly pulling his yellow garments back on: sweatshirt, trousers, even his socks are yellow—and the twenty-five-stone man who keeps muttering to himself and lets loose a final howl as if he’s experienced a resounding orgasm. I refrain from writing to my mother about these people.

If she were alive I would want her to believe I’m comfortable, even while I suffer my post-battle fears and indignities. Knowledge is healing, Sophie says, but I do not think all knowledge helps mothers.

My accommodations this September are no worse than they have been previously. At The Old Brewery I have a pretty good bed if I need it. But I prefer my tent after dark, on the mountain, which isn’t really a mountain, but a large hill in quite a nice park in the centre of Montreal.

Do not worry about my spirits! A friend has given me a little trick to make me feel more at home here….Not the way I felt at your house, of course, Mother. No place in Canada has the comforts of the room where you lay, or the little parlour where my father and I used to dress.

Nearly everything here is different and I am in an alien world, but this friend tells me I should dwell not on the differences between here and home, but on familiar things that have never changed…such as pigeons.