My October

by Claire Holden Rothman

  Hugo mumbled something about being grounded. A lame excuse, but there was no way he was going to this thing. No way in the world.

  Vien didn’t get it. It was as if he hadn’t even seen Hugo’s sneer. The man was bent over his desk, scribbling down his cell phone number on a slip of paper. Jesus. He was serious about this. Vien looked up as he handed the number to Hugo.

  “Try to come. I can convince your mom, if you want.”

  Like he really wanted Vien telephoning his mother. The skin of Hugo’s chest and face prickled with heat. He shoved the flyer and the slip of paper into his pocket. “That’s okay,” he said, although the situation was as far from okay as he could imagine.

  18

  A ll the way home on the metro, Hugo couldn’t push Lanctôt out of his mind. He’d kidnapped a man, and yet his dad and Vien and all kinds of other supposedly sane and thoughtful people were throwing a party in his honour? And then there was his dad, revered by all of Quebec, and yet such a prick. The world was a truly messed-up place.

  It was rush hour. Hugo got caught in the throngs at the Guy-Concordia metro station. On the train, he was forced to squeeze in beside a guy whose headphones bled music so loudly Hugo felt it shaking in his bones. Most of the riders were students. Somebody had dropped a bottle of iced tea, which rolled back and forth under the seats, splattering the floor with sticky brown liquid. People stepped over the puddles as they entered and exited the car, but no one thought to pick up the bottle.

  Hugo’s sneakers made faint sucking sounds with every step on the staircase at Lionel-Groulx. Iced tea syrup. He looked at the stream of people on the escalator and remembered the physical shock of seeing his father.

  When he got home, his mother was reading on the couch. She was always there now, glued permanently to the cushions. She blinked as if she wasn’t sure who he was and spoke his name in a dreamy voice.

  He didn’t answer.

  Her books and some pillows were scattered beside her on the floor. A couple of Kleenexes too. The place was a pigsty. And there was no whiff of food coming from the kitchen. She’d probably forgotten about dinner. Again. The fridge had been empty for days. The kitchen, when he entered it, had a sour smell. He walked to a window and yanked it open.

  “Hey, summer’s over,” his mother said, coming into the kitchen and rubbing her arms. But neither of them made any move to close it.

  He made Kraft Dinner. She wasn’t hungry, so he took the whole pot for himself, upending it on his plate and dotting the bright orange noodles with splotches of ketchup. She sat across from him, elbows on the table, and watched him eat.

  He couldn’t stand her long, mournful face, the greasy smell of her hair. This thing with his dad was killing her; anyone could see that. And yet she was the one who had given everything up, handing him her language, her culture, even her name, as if none of it meant a thing. How had she thought it would end? He couldn’t even feel sorry for her.

  He needed a strong parent right now, not this beaten-down person. He needed to ask her things. About his father. About her father.

  Vien had said that Alfred Stern had been a Crown prosecutor. Hugo was confused. He’d thought his grandfather had defended criminals, not prosecuted them. And he’d played some kind of role in the October Crisis. An important one, Vien had suggested. This hadn’t been mentioned when Hugo had done the project in grade six. Hugo did know that his grandfather had left Quebec shortly after René Lévesque came to power, giving up his house on the mountain and ending up in Toronto with all the other Anglos. The Exodus. His mother had told him that soldiers had guarded their Westmount home. There were two of them, only a few years older than she was. Hugo had seen a photograph of her, at age twelve, posing between two guys with helmets and C7s.

  So many questions. Hugo was lost in his thoughts when the telephone in the pantry rang. His mother made no move to get up. After five rings, the answering machine clicked on and a woman’s voice spoke. “Hey, Hannah. It’s Allison at the Word.” The voice sounded pissed. She’d already left two messages and asked to be called back. His mother made a face as the woman hung up.

  “You could’ve taken it,” Hugo said, swallowing the last of his macaroni, which was now cold.

  His mother smiled her weary smile, which he found hateful. He was about to say as much when the phone rang again. And again his mother just sat there. By the third ring, he couldn’t stand it anymore. He stood up, but she shook her head. He stayed where he was.

  From the pantry came a woman’s voice.

  At first, Hugo didn’t recognize it. “Is that Oma?” It sounded too feeble to be his grandmother.

  “Where are you?” it asked.

  “I’m done,” said Hugo. He pointed at his empty plate. There was a house rule about dinner and telephones. You didn’t answer if there was food on your plate. But this, quite obviously, had nothing to do with rules.

  His mother sat there, slumped in her chair. Hugo sat down again and the answering machine clicked off.

  He addressed his plate. “Vien knows your dad.”

  She lifted her head and nodded. She was still wearing her nightgown, the same one she’d had on when he left for school that morning.

  “He said he was a prosecutor.”

  She blinked. “That’s not quite true,” she said. “He was a defence lawyer.” She frowned and then continued. “But the government made him a special prosecutor.” She pressed her fingertips into old crumbs on the table. “In 1970. To deal with the people who’d been arrested under the War Measures Act.”

  “Is that why you hate him so much?”

  “Who?” She looked up in surprise. “My father?”

  “Because he put them all in jail?”

  “He didn’t put them in jail, Hugo. The police did that.”

  “But he was part of it, right? Part of the operation. That’s what Vien said. His name was in all the papers. They hated him. Is that why we don’t see him now?”

  She had assembled a little pile of crumbs in front of her. “We do see him, Hugo. I do. I just spent a week—”

  He cut her off. “You hate going down there.”

  Hannah shook her head. “I don’t hate it,” she said. “And I certainly don’t hate him.”

  She was lying. Treating him like a child and assuming she could still get away with it.

  Hugo took a breath. “What did he do to you? Hit you? Abuse you in some way? You can tell me. I don’t need protecting anymore.”

  His mother’s eyes closed. He wanted to shout and make her look at him. But then she started to speak. Very softly. Her eyes were still closed and her face was slack and expressionless. He leaned toward her, holding his breath. “We used to fight,” she said. “Not physically. It never went beyond words, but the words were pretty awful. For some reason, he saw me as an enemy.” She sighed. “When your dad came into my life, it made things worse.”

  So there it was, just as Hugo had imagined. His father was at the heart of it. He was the one who had broken up the family.

  “Is he why you stayed?”

  Seconds passed. Her eyelids were darker than the rest of her face, the colour of a bruise.

  “Maman?” he said, but her eyes stayed closed.

  Silence. The story of his mother’s life. And of his.

  He picked up his plate and brought it to the sink. She’d opened her eyes, but he no longer cared. He turned the faucet on so hard that water splashed onto his shirt front. The plate slipped from his hands and clattered against the stainless steel. He left it there and walked out of the kitchen.

  He closed his bedroom door and stood there, breathing hard. He hated his life. He hated his fucking father, hated his depressed rag doll of a mother. The floor creaked in the hallway and Hugo’s breath stopped. He strained to hear, but the hallway fell silent. He felt angrier, then, at the stupid hope that he couldn’t stop from rising up in him. Damn his mother. It was time to put away childish things: a favourite saying of his father’s. An image of
his father materialized in the semi-darkness. Hugo took an experimental swing at it and smashed his fist into its nose. The face looked at him, surprised. He swung again, this time at the mouth, with another satisfying impact. On and on he swung, his heart beating wildly, until the face was a pulpy mess.

  He collapsed backward on his bed. He’d once loved his father more than anyone in the world, more even than Hannah. His whole life had been one unbroken effort to please him. That was what being a child was about. You didn’t question. You spoke like him, you dressed like him, you ate all his favourite foods. Hugo shook his head in disgust. Childhood was over now.

  He picked up a book that was lying on the floor. Vallières. His father must have read it too, back in the 1970s. The story he told of his own father was identical to Vallières’s. Both men had worked in factories. Both had had their spirits crushed by evil Anglo bosses. Luc Lévesque had made his name on this cliché: a French-Canadian martyr-father had figured in every one of his books. It was like a trademark. Scholars wrote papers about it. This father figure was always long-dead. He hovered above Luc’s plots like a ghost, blocking the way as his son tried to define himself in a rapidly changing world. At least, that was what Hugo’s literature teacher at Saint-Jean-Baptiste had said two years ago, when they’d studied Tanneur tanné.

  Hugo had recognized so many things in Tanneur tanné— Saint-Henri’s streets, its churches and factories, the train tracks, the canal—that it felt more like fact than fiction. He had never met his father’s father. Roland Lévesque had died before he was born, but Tanneur tanné had resurrected him for Hugo, if only partially, because in the novel his character was a ghost. But for Hugo, the book had been a first step. Hugo’s entire class had met his dead grandfather. They knew him as well as Hugo did.

  After reading his father’s first novel, Hugo embarked on the others, lifting them one after the other from the living room bookshelf reserved for his father’s publications and their translations. That was how he came upon a fictionalized version of his second grandfather, Alfred Stern. He materialized in Les blues de Saint-Ambroise as the host of a party into which the young Québécois hero had stumbled, invited by the host’s beautiful English daughter. Alfred Stern’s last name was changed to Klein, which in German meant “small,” but the physical traits were all there. The Westmount home was described in detail, as were the kind of people Hugo’s grandfather had invited to his parties, all English, all shaking with fear at the thought that Quebec might become a country one day. Les blues was set in January 1977, two months after the separatists had won a victory—their first ever—in a provincial election.

  The scene was intended to be comic, with the petit gars from Saint-Henri committing gaffe after social gaffe at the table of his wealthy father-in-law-to-be. But Hugo had not laughed. Alfred Stern came across as a bigot, a cartoon of a man, baiting his daughter’s French boyfriend without mercy, and then, when the young man finally rose to the challenge, kicking him shamelessly out of the house.

  Hugo opened Vallières at the place at which he’d fallen asleep the night before. “Sometimes,” he read, squinting in the weak light from the overhead, “one imagines that one’s past has disappeared leaving no memory, like a cloud that has drifted apart in the sky. But that is an illusion. One has only to be immobilized for a few weeks (in prison, for example) to find one’s past again and relive it in its smallest details.” Hugo slammed the book shut and let it fall to the floor. He was in prison too—a kind of prison—and like Vallières he was rediscovering the past. Only it was not his past. It belonged to his father, to Vien, to Jacques Lanctôt.

  On the dust jackets of his father’s books, Hugo had read the claim that his father was the voice of his generation. Which poor sucker, he wondered, would end up speaking for his generation? The generation that had watched hijacked planes fly straight into Manhattan’s two tallest towers, and for whom the word suicide was, as likely as not, followed by bomber. Perhaps his generation would be voiceless, condemned to having older men like his father repeat their own stories, thoughtlessly, mechanically, until they finally rolled over and died.

  Vallières was a lousy writer. That was the sad truth of it. His sentences were bloated with slogans and terms meant to shock a reader. Words like nigger, for example, and slave, applied carelessly and wrongly to the Québécois. Monsieur Vien had also talked about a writer named Frantz Fanon. Fanon wrote about Algeria and its suffering under French colonial rule. The political situation in Quebec in October 1970 was totally different from Algeria, yet Fanon’s words had inspired Lanctôt’s kidnapping plot.

  Hugo pulled off his itchy school shirt, scrunched it into a ball, and hurled it across the room. As he pulled off his pants, he remembered the flyer in his pocket and retrieved it. Une célébration d’un des nôtres. Hugo made a face. Then he checked his alarm clock.

  Screw reading. He wouldn’t pick up Vallières again if someone paid him. It would be interesting to see Lanctôt in action. He didn’t have to speak to him or anything. He could watch. Anonymously. Consider it a fact-finding mission.

  He pulled on his favourite pair of jeans and a hoodie, and fished an old pair of sneakers from his closet. Then he turned the lights off and positioned his pillows under the duvet to make it appear that he’d gone to sleep. His window had a ledge from which, if you didn’t mind heights, you could jump onto the fire escape.

  The night was colder than he’d thought. He hit his knee when he landed, so hard that the iron bars hummed. He crouched, holding his breath until the noise and the pain subsided. The living room glowed before him. His mother was on the couch, a book propped on her knees. She was thinner than he had ever seen her. Older-looking too. The hair at her temples was turning grey. She raised her head suddenly, and looked directly at him. She couldn’t see him, though, he was pretty certain. She sat up and looked at her reflection in the window. What she saw didn’t appear to make her happy. She touched her hair and looked away.

  Hugo climbed slowly down the fire escape. Lyse’s flat was lit up too, but she had curtains and they were drawn. Through the lacy white material, he made out the silhouette of a form. No, two forms. It was probably Graeme White, the English guy she claimed was just a friend.

  The ground-floor flat was completely black. The last few steps weren’t steps at all but the rungs of a ladder, from which it was a long drop to the grass. For several seconds, Hugo hung as if on a trapeze, swaying over a black void. He landed hard, then jumped to his feet and ran. By the time he reached the street, he felt almost calm.

  The party for Lanctôt was on Saint-Joseph Boulevard, not far from Saint-Laurent. That was on the orange metro line. Half an hour later, Hugo was jogging up the stairs at the Laurier station. Saint-Joseph Boulevard was a wide, divided street that seemed to lead straight to the mountain, which crouched to the west, crowned with a glittering cross. Hugo walked toward it.

  He didn’t have to go far. He spotted the place almost immediately, alerted by the crowd of people crammed into the front yard. Like many of the houses in this part of the city, it had a porch and a little patch of grass. Some of the houses had bushes and flowers, but the garden here was bare.

  Hugo slowed his pace. He didn’t like crowds. And in this one everybody seemed to be talking at once, laughing and blowing smoke from cigarettes at the pale slice of moon. Hugo was bound to stand out in this gathering. He was way younger than everyone else. And because of his height, they would think he was even younger. A woman unlatched the gate for him, smiling tenderly, the way a mother might. He had a sudden urge to run, but the woman was watching him, so he had no choice but to keep going. People blocked his path. They were everywhere, spilling out of the house onto the porch, hanging over the wooden railing, waving their hands, discussing things. Inside was even worse. There was no air at all. The hallway, which was lightless, led to a bright main room, which turned out to be two rooms. A black man was standing at a podium reading something about Port-au-Prince and making people laugh
. Every seat in the place was taken.

  Hugo could hardly breathe. He tried to retrace his steps, but people were pushing in from behind him now, blocking his exit. Everywhere he looked, more people kept appearing, elbowing their way forward. The black man closed his book and people started clapping. Then a man in the front row stood up to shake his hand. Hugo stared. He was shorter than in the newspaper photos. Fatter. And his eyes darted. Beside him was another person Hugo recognized, holding his hands above his head and hooting and clapping. His father. And next to his father was the woman Hugo had seen at the metro station. Vien was sitting one row behind them, grinning like a loon.

  Jacques Lanctôt stepped up to the podium. “A difficult act to follow,” he said, shaking his head with false regret. He looked up at the packed room as the last of the applause frittered away. “Unless, bien sûr, your name is Luc Lévesque.”

  The room erupted again. People weren’t just clapping now, they were whistling and stamping their feet. Lanctôt waited until they calmed down. “It’s an honour to have this esteemed auteur with us. The voice of our people. I cannot tell you what pleasure it gives me.” He held out his hands, his gaze briefly direct, his eyes shining. “Come up here, Luc.”

  His father rose to his feet. Before going to the stage, however, he bent over the woman and kissed her on the mouth. In public. In front of all these people.

  His father’s mouth now wore a trace of her lipstick. He looked like a stupid clown. Hugo felt ill. He hoped the Kraft Dinner he’d wolfed down an hour earlier would not come back up. He tried to move toward the hall, but the crowd behind him was like a wall, solid and insistent like the Montreal metro at rush hour. He didn’t stand a chance.