My October

by Claire Holden Rothman

  “It is a criminal offence, yes,” said Audet.

  Luc felt the air go out of him. Hugo liked guns. A lot. This was a surprise, but not a shock. Not an inconceivable thing.

  Bonnaire retrieved the gun delicately from his hand. “We’ve brought you in today, Monsieur Lévesque, to try to avoid laying criminal charges.”

  “As far as we can tell,” Detective Sergeant Audet said, “your son had no intention of firing the weapon. It was wrapped in bubble wrap when it was discovered. It was not loaded. There was no ammunition on his person or in his school locker. If there had been, this would be a much, much more serious case.”

  “How are things at home?” Bonnaire asked.

  Luc remembered the fight. The tears and humiliation. His son, fragile as a bird in his grip. He looked up and saw Bonnaire staring.

  “Why did you sigh?”

  Had he? He felt his face grow hot again.

  “Monsieur Lévesque, I know this is hard, but any information you can give us will help.”

  “His mother’s out of town,” Luc said, his voice surprisingly plaintive.

  “Monsieur Vien mentioned that to me,” said Bonnaire, eyeing him thoughtfully. “I gather you and he are friends.”

  Luc nodded.

  “And your wife is an anglophone.” Bonnaire’s face was neutral, but the remark was so blunt it left Luc at a loss for words.

  Bonnaire spoke again. “I only mention it because it seems to be a matter of importance.”

  “A matter of importance,” Luc repeated blankly.

  “For your son. He seems very proud of his English heritage.”

  “His heritage is also French,” Luc said, bristling. The language of his wife had always been problematic, but rarely did people push his face in it. “I hope you don’t doubt my allegiance to the language of Quebec.”

  The principal allowed himself a smile. “I’d say you’ve proven that allegiance admirably to the entire world, Monsieur Lévesque. But not all sons share the attachments of their fathers. I don’t know what was in your son’s mind this morning when he walked into this building. I only know that language is a sensitive subject for him, as it is for many of us. And I know what we discovered in his bag.” He nodded at the gun, now lying between them on the blotter. “This is the first time in the entire history of Collège Saint-Jean-Baptiste that someone has brought a firearm onto school grounds.”

  “You think it was because of language?”

  Bonnaire let the question hang in the hot air. Luc’s thoughts were spinning. His own son, engaging in political violence—on the wrong side?

  Bonnaire cleared his throat. “Rest assured, Monsieur Lévesque, we’re well aware that you are one of our most distinguished anciens. You have shown nothing but respect for this school, and we hope we have returned the favour. This could simply be a youthful error of judgment on the part of your son. Energy diverted into an unfortunate channel. Hugo may not be an outgoing boy, but his behaviour has never been cause for undue concern in the past. Still, it’s a concern today. I have a thousand students in my charge. Two thousand parents to keep happy. Surely you can sympathize.”

  He hadn’t offered Luc a direct answer. But then, in Montreal, language was, as Bonnaire said, a matter of importance, too volatile to address head-on. Bonnaire was in his element now: a shepherd guarding his flock. “I’m pleased with the way the staff responded when the gun was brought to our attention by one of the students,” he said, his face composed and serious. “They acted quickly and with courage. No drama, no hesitation. And thankfully, no one was hurt. But people could have been hurt.” He shook his head at this alarming thought. “We have been extremely fortunate.”

  He paused, scrutinizing Luc from across the table. “What happens now depends on you, Monsieur Lévesque. And on your son, it goes without saying. I will require absolute cooperation from both of you. The alternative is disaster. For you, for Hugo, for all of us here at the school. I’ll tell you honestly, I would like very much to avoid a disaster.” The shepherd’s guise wavered briefly, and Luc saw a small, round, middle-aged man, a tired, anxious man. The sort of man he could find it in his heart to sympathize with.

  “There will be a conseil disciplinaire,” Bonnaire continued. “If this turns out to be worse than it seems, if we find a conspiracy, or ammunition, or any proof of an intention to cause bodily harm, Detective Sergeant Audet will be back and criminal charges will be laid.”

  Two diplomas hung in black frames on the wall behind Bonnaire’s head. Beside them was a photo of the principal shaking hands with Lucien Bouchard, who had resigned the previous winter as Quebec’s premier. It was an old picture, taken before the last referendum. Before the amputation of Bouchard’s leg. He looked absurdly young and hopeful. Luc stared at the picture. His head felt scooped out, like a melon rind.

  There was a knock at the door, and a bearded man poked his head in.

  “Monsieur Ducharme,” said Bonnaire. “Please come in.”

  Monsieur Ducharme entered, followed by Hugo, whose school uniform swamped his skinny frame. After they were seated, Bonnaire addressed Hugo. “Your father has been told about this morning’s events.”

  Hugo gazed at his hands. He never glanced at his father—a fact the other men noticed. His expression was sullen, unhappy. His ear was scabbed and red.

  “We have shown your father the gun,” said Bonnaire. Still no reaction. Luc squeezed his hands together, stifling an urge to reach out and shake the boy.

  “For now,” Bonnaire continued, “no criminal charges will be laid, although that could change.” He leaned forward, pausing for a moment, but Hugo kept staring at the floor. “This is a serious thing you have done, and there will be consequences. At the very least, there will be a disciplinary hearing here at the school. Possibly sometime next week, unless we find that the police must be brought in. In the interim, you are suspended. Do you understand what that means? You have been told about suspensions?”

  Ducharme nodded on Hugo’s behalf.

  “You will not set foot in this school again until you are formally summoned to appear. You have your books and things with you? You have emptied your locker?”

  Hugo nodded: his first and last communication of the meeting.

  Luc was trembling with emotion. He managed to shake Bonnaire’s hand and state more or less coherently that he would take care of things. He shook Detective Sergeant Audet’s hand too and, enveloped in shame, led his son out of the principal’s office.

  As they walked through the familiar corridors, he did not say a word. They descended the worn steps to the main hallway, passed the receptionist, and went out the front door.

  On Sherbrooke Street, he finally spoke. “How could you?”

  The sun had already started its descent and cast shadows before them. The boy didn’t answer. The only sound came from his shoelaces, which flapped undone on the pavement with every step.

  5

  That evening at her parents’ home, Hannah cooked a squash soup, filling the house with familiar, calming smells. Connie had stayed late at the hospital, and Hannah wanted to have something hot for her when she returned.

  She had turned on the radio and tuned in to Radio-Canada’s suppertime newscast. Hearing the news in French gave her a feeling of the habitual, of being in her own home. A report had just come on about Jacques Lanctôt, one of the instigators of the 1970 October Crisis. Hannah stopped what she was doing. She wanted to hear this. Luc’s most recent book, the one she was now contracted to translate, was about Lanctôt. Or rather, inspired by him.

  According to Radio-Canada, he had written an open letter to the newspapers condemning the attack on the World Trade Center in New York. A sentence struck her as the news reader quoted the letter: “Au nom de toutes les victimes innocentes, je crie vengeance.” She stood there, feeling her blood rise. Jacques Lanctôt was speaking out for the victims of terrorists? The previous year, on the thirtieth anniversary of the October Crisis, Lanctôt had g
iven numerous interviews, visibly enjoying his notoriety, acting as though people had lost their memories. And perhaps they had. Jacques Lanctôt had been transformed, by wilful forgetting, into some kind of prophet.

  Hannah switched the food processor on. Good thing Connie wasn’t here, or, worse still, her father. Quebec was a forbidden topic of conversation; it had, after all, caused the estrangement. Her father blamed Luc, of course, but Hannah and Alfred had disagreed about Quebec long before Luc came on the scene. Luc may have been the most pressing reason for her decision to stay in Montreal when her father decided to leave, but the conflict had begun years before, in the fall of 1970.

  That September, she’d started high school. A month later, life in the Stern household went off the rails.

  Outside the house, life had turned equally crazy. Highprofile kidnappings were committed by the Front de Libération du Québec, the FLQ. One of those kidnappings resulted in the murder of Pierre Laporte, Quebec’s minister of labour. The federal government declared martial law. Five hundred people were arrested.

  Hannah’s father had been named a special prosecutor and given the politically sensitive job of dealing with the arrested individuals. He became an instant celebrity as the public face of government repression. Those who were arrested sat in jail for days, unable to contact their families or even a lawyer. It was an outrage, an aberration. For Hannah, it was the end of her childhood.

  Although he eventually released nearly all the prisoners, Alfred Stern was reviled. Death threats were made. The family took refuge in a hotel. There was briefly talk of sending Hannah and Benjamin to boarding school in the United States. It didn’t happen, but when the Sterns returned to their home after ten days, they found that soldiers had been assigned to guard them, camping in the garage at night, alternating shifts as the family slept. These two young men escorted Hannah and Benjamin to school and drove Alfred to his office. Hannah felt like a prisoner.

  Her father had always believed that the arrests and his own actions were justified. He and Hannah argued bitterly about it for years. Which was why it was now off limits. Better not to broach it, or to mention the name of Luc Lévesque, the celebrated Québécois nationalist whom Hannah later married.

  And so she never spoke to her father about her work as a literary translator. Her specialty was Quebec fiction, although she also liked biography. Her translations had won prizes. She’d rendered brick-like tomes on the lives of Gabrielle Roy and René Lévesque into English, and she’d done smaller works too, on artists like Ozias Leduc and Paul-Émile Borduas. She’d also translated essays and publications about Quebec culture and history. And, of course, she’d rendered her husband’s entire oeuvre into English. Besides being Luc’s wife, she was his official English voice. None of this was even remotely mentionable in the presence of Alfred Stern. She could speak to her father about her son, provided she restricted herself to his health and schooling, but even school had become a difficult subject after Hugo started attending the Collège Saint-Jean-Baptiste.

  Hannah dipped a spoon into the pot and stirred. The soup was a rich orange colour. She wiped bits of ginger skin and sprigs of coriander off the stovetop and retreated into the breakfast room overlooking the garden, where her parents frequently ate. This was where Connie had found him, on his back, wearing what looked like a grin.

  Hannah’s laptop was on the table in the breakfast room. Her screen saver was a photograph of Hugo at age seven on a swing, his head thrown back, laughing. It was her favourite picture of him: happiness distilled.

  She clicked an icon and a too-familiar file came up: Death of a Dreamer, Luc’s most recently published novel. The alliterative English title pleased her; little else about the book did.

  This had never happened to Hannah before. She had always loved the books her husband wrote. Some more than others, of course, but every one of them had moved her. She loved Luc’s agility of mind, his intuitive skill at telling stories. It had never occurred to her that this might change. There were writers you liked and writers you didn’t. Sometimes a writer was uneven, but mostly it was a question of chemistry. Like love.

  She’d been young when she met Luc, not yet eighteen, but despite her age she’d been neither blind nor stupid. She had always been a reader. Even as a child, she’d known precisely what books she preferred. Luc was the first published writer she had met, apart from an aging poet who had read once at her high school and tried to grope the girls. Luc was her teacher, so it was natural she would go to the library in the early days of term and look up his work. Tanneur tanné was the first Quebec novel she ever read. It told of characters living in her own city, thinking thoughts Hannah herself had thought. The characters had troubles like she had. In their lives she discerned the outline of her own. They were poor. They spoke French. They lived in Saint-Henri, cultural light years from where she had grown up. Yet she inhabited their skin; they inhabited hers.

  She and Luc became lovers that summer, a few weeks after she finished her first year at Dawson College. The following winter, she invited him to her family’s annual New Year’s Eve gathering. It was the end of 1976. René Lévesque and the Parti Québécois had just formed Quebec’s first separatist government. The antipathy between her long-haired nationalist boyfriend and Alfred Stern was instantaneous. The fact that Luc had been her teacher didn’t help. Twenty years of marriage had done nothing to mitigate it.

  On New Year’s Day of 1977, the morning after that first meeting, Alfred Stern coined a nickname for the man who would become his son-in-law: the Pied Piper. He never again used Luc’s real name, with its echo of the new separatist premier. Her father was intransigent, and Luc did little to bridge the gap. He made no effort to be sensitive, never toned down his nationalist rhetoric.

  Her father had gotten at least one thing right with the nickname. Luc Lévesque had enchanted her. The year they met, he’d just turned twenty-four. To a seventeen-year-old girl, that had seemed outrageously grown-up. Teaching at Dawson College was his first real job. He smoked cigarettes in class, tapping ashes onto the floor, because, of course, there were no ashtrays. The students watched, rapt, all of them loving him, even the boys, many of whom grew their hair and sported beards in emulation of his scruffy style. Privately, they called him Lucky Luc.

  And lucky he was. A big man, muscular and well-built. Girls went quiet or else giggled in his presence. But it wasn’t his looks that made Hannah’s legs go weak that first day. It was his voice.

  Tanneur tanné had been published the previous spring and had catapulted his life onto a new path. He was hailed across the province as the literary heir to Gabrielle Roy. When he spoke in the classroom, he was sonorous and self-assured.

  He won a Governor General’s Award, stirring up a scandal when he declined to go to Ottawa to pick up the prize. A publisher in Paris bought French rights for Europe, and Luc received a wildly favourable notice in Le Monde. And then Hannah translated the book. He could have had any translator he wanted, and he chose her. How she had laboured. By that time, of course, she had moved into the triplex in Saint-Henri. People said he was crazy to trust her. She was a child. His English publisher tried hard to dissuade him, but Luc’s mind was made up. He sheltered Hannah in the flat and fed her a steady diet of encouragement and praise until the job was done.

  Her translation won its own Governor General’s Award, which she accepted with gratitude. It helped Luc gain an English readership across North America. And it established Hannah as a literary translator. Luc had gone over every word of the text with her, answering all her questions, alerting her to the slightest nuance of meaning. They were used to the roles of student and teacher. He was opinionated, full of loud certitudes, a lover of argument. Very much like her father, she eventually realized. But by then, she knew how to handle it. She welcomed him into her work as easily as into her bed.

  Now she scrolled dispiritedly through the text on her screen. The book was late. Allison March, her editor at the Word Press, had been
sending frequent, increasingly uneasy emails. The unease diminished after Hannah explained about her father, but the emails kept coming, incessant pricks to her conscience.

  Hannah’s resistance to this book had begun long before Alfred Stern’s stroke. She’d been slow from the start, limping along, unable to find her stride. She had a reputation for being reliable with deadlines, but suddenly with Dreamer she did not care.

  And yet. The writing was lovely. The structure worked. Luc’s protagonist faced a series of ever-greater obstacles. But there was no pleasure in the book. No lightness. And it ended in death: a suicide. Perhaps Luc had meant the ending metaphorically, but a metaphor for what? When she asked him about it, he shrugged. That was what had come to him.

  She read over the most recent paragraph she had translated, days ago, in Montreal. The young Cuban woman had just told the protagonist she was pregnant. Her eyes were radiant. She wanted this child, their child. But the man had turned away. He already had a son. The reality, he told her, would only mock the dream.

  Hannah couldn’t help taking it personally. The reality would mock the dream. She and Luc had dreamed once too—of a marriage that would do away with the old divisions of language and culture, and make for them a space in which to live and work, side by side.

  Luc had enrolled in an English class. Every week for a year, he’d walked to the basement of a local school and returned home dutifully to read the English newspaper. He’d asked Hannah to list her favourite novels in English. He had actually planned to read them. Hannah had no idea where that list now was.

  These days he was writing nonsense—men turning their backs on paternity and on the women they purported to love. What had happened to the dream?

  The story was loosely based on Jacques Lanctôt’s life. Very loosely, because Lanctôt didn’t have merely one son. He had something like seven or eight kids, maybe more. He had never been one to refuse paternity. The scene with the Cuban girl had little to do with this aspect of his life. It sprang from Luc’s own dark fears.