At the podium, Jacques Lanctôt had put an arm around his father. Lanctôt was grinning, pressing against him as if they were long lost brothers. He gave a speech about the p’tit gars de Saint-Henri and how Luc Lévesque had possessed the guts and the genius to set his stories locally, with characters culled from his own petite vie. Writers like Luc, he said, significantly dropping his father’s last name, gave the people of Quebec a voice with which to address the world.
The room erupted into cheers.
Somehow Hugo pushed his way into the hall. People were staring at him. Some of them swore as well, but to get back out that door he was willing to face their displeasure. He was convinced that he would vomit. His mouth was full of water. It was all he could do to keep upright. But the minute he was out, his panic fell magically away. The nausea was replaced by euphoria. He felt as if he’d scaled a mountain, crossed enemy lines. He’d made it.
The smokers were still in the yard, although the woman who had opened the gate for him was nowhere to be seen. What a relief. He unlatched the gate and slipped out onto the sidewalk, not bothering to close it. And then he took off, sprinting down the wide boulevard, knees and elbows pumping, his boy’s body blazing like a shooting star through the night. Only when the downward arrow of the Montreal metro came into sight did his feet slow. He’d done it. He’d broken free. And nothing in this pitiful, two-faced excuse for a world would ever force him to return.
19
Hannah awoke with the panicky sensation that someone was kneeling on her chest, pressing the air out of her. She sat up, rubbed her eyes, and squinted at the clock on Luc’s bedside table. It was a couple of minutes past four. Three hours to go till sunrise.
She needed to talk to Hugo, to explain. Not that she felt remotely capable of doing so. How could she put something as fraught as her relationship with Alfred Stern into words? She had never had a sense of kinship with her father, not even when she was a child. In some dark corner of his heart or soul, he was appalled by her. Her colouring was different from his. Her height and build were wrong, not to mention her opinions. This was the central fact of Hannah’s life, the one that had structured the whole of her experience: she had been unable to win her father’s love.
At nineteen, she’d given up. When he moved to Toronto, she pushed him out of her mind. It had worked. The distance allowed her to function with something that felt, at least at first, like tranquility. But now her father was back with a vengeance, crying out for attention as he lay speechless in a Toronto hospital. And Hugo was his defender, accusing her of callous disregard.
Why had she stayed in Montreal? Maybe there was no answer to this question. Maybe there were just moments. Memories and scenes. Like the disastrous New Year’s Eve party when her father and Luc met for the first time. Luc had immortalized it in Les blues de Saint-Ambroise, but her impression of the occasion was different, even if Les blues had, inevitably, reshaped her memory. Fiction did that. It solidified things, which was a problem, because life was fundamentally fluid. There were a thousand ways to interpret it, all worthy, no matter how cleverly a writer like Luc Lévesque tried to convince you otherwise. Hannah knew her father more intimately than Luc did, knew his history, his culture. Knew what might, perhaps, lead a man to throw his daughter’s newly acquired, semi-famous, long-haired, separatist Québécois boyfriend out of his home on a snowy New Year’s Eve in the mid-1970s. Alfred Stern, doubtless, had a different version of his own. Reality boiled down to this in the end: the story you told. Everyone had one. No one could claim a right to the last word.
Now that she’d begun to think about it, there were other stories she could tell Hugo. Stories that went further back, to a time before her birth. The story of her father’s escape from Austria, of his arrival in Canada as a potential enemy of the state when he was barely sixteen. She couldn’t remember the name of the prison camp where he’d ended up, but she remembered certain details. It was in New Brunswick. And he’d had to wear the uniform she’d told Manny Mandelbaum about, the one with the red target on the back. Her father had slept in an unheated barracks crowded with other Jewish German and Austrian refugees. He’d chopped trees all that winter, freezing his fingers so badly he still carried the scars.
Some of this information Hannah had received second-hand from Connie. Alfred Stern did not like looking back. Once he’d been released from the camp, he had tried to strip himself clean of anything associated with it and with his country of origin. This desire, Hannah knew, lay behind many things.
Was it Aristotle who said man is his desire? Alfred Stern’s desire had been to fit in, to take the colours of his new habitat and make them his own. This explained Connie, the blond beauty he’d met at a McGill football game and courted so vigorously that six months later she married him. It explained why he had not insisted on her conversion to Judaism, and why Hannah and Benjamin had received a largely secular upbringing.
The moment he gained his freedom in Canada, Alfred Stern had set about disappearing. With each passing year, he erased a little more of himself, the better to gain entry into a world with little tolerance for people like him. The deeper into that world he ventured, the less there remained of the immigrant child who had arrived alone and friendless in this cold, wintry country. But erasure came at a cost. The more he disappeared, the harder it became to recall essential parts of himself, and to reveal them, even in the safety of his own home.
It was all speculation, of course, a daughter’s necessarily partial account of a man whose past was inaccessible to her. But how had Manny Mandelbaum put it? Adulthood was the vantage point from which you could tell the story of your parents, really start imagining them as human beings with their own complex pasts. This much, Hannah had done. Or at least was in the process of doing.
She pulled the sheets up, letting the cotton rest lightly on her lips. She would talk to Hugo at breakfast, she decided, provided she could get him out of bed in time to sit down with her. She pictured the intimate scene, herself and her son in the kitchen eating toast together. Yes, she would start with the story of that family party all those years ago on the last night of 1976 at her father’s home on the hill. The memory was still singularly painful.
She turned on the bedside lamp and glanced at the side of the mattress that used to belong to Luc. Folding her knees into her chest, she made a hummock in the flat plain of the bed, and soon she was asleep.
SHE WOKE UP STARTLED. The lamp beside the bed was still on. She was lying on her back with her knees drawn up. She unhooked her fingers and gingerly stretched out her legs, one at a time, beneath the duvet. She had dreamt of her father. He’d looked different, though. For a split second, Hannah had glimpsed another, much younger person when she’d scrutinized his face.
She blinked uncomfortably. The light from her bedside lamp was shining directly in her eyes. She rolled out of bed, suddenly recalling all the things she needed to do this morning. It was past seven, she saw from Luc’s clock. She’d have to hurry if she was going to make Hugo breakfast and tell him her story.
The house was silent when she emerged from the bathroom. She knocked on Hugo’s door, and knocked again when he didn’t answer. After the third try, she grew impatient and opened the door. The duvet had been pulled up crudely over his three pillows. That was the first shock. Hanging from his closet doorknob, just to the left of the bed, were his school clothes. The next shock was the cold. The window was wide open, with the screen on the floor below it.
Hannah rushed to the window. She felt sick and alert at the same time, her senses desperately alive, sucking in every colour, shape, and texture: the cloudless morning sky, the beige paint flaking in shaggy feathers on the neighbour’s balcony, the rusted iron railings of the fire escape. Her hands braced themselves on the window ledge and she bent over, sticking her head out into the bracing October air. The gravel in the yard came into view. A pile of leaves raked up against the front of Lyse’s shed. A strip of yellowed grass, trampled and dead, awaiting
snow.
No body, though. No fallen son. Her knees felt weak with relief.
She lifted her hands from the ledge and held herself, rocking. She breathed in the cold air. He hadn’t jumped. Her arms were trembling. She looked out into the day and registered now what in her panic she had missed before. The fire escape. Luc had used it too when he was a boy. He’d told her stories about illicit late-night escapades.
Hugo’s hoodie was gone. And his favourite jeans. She slammed the window shut and ran out of the bedroom to the front hall for her coat. She hadn’t felt such a rush of pure energy in months. She hurried down the stairs, past Lyse’s door, and out into the dazzling morning. Frost had come in the night, covering the cars with a fuzzy skin. It was shockingly cold, and the outside stairs were treacherous. The icy metal railing stung her hand.
She’d left without gloves or a hat. She balled her hands into fists and ran into the alley behind the house. She looked into the yard, the neighbours’ gardens. No sign of Hugo. Everything was in its place. She re-emerged from the alley and ran down Laporte Street to Saint-Jacques, her heart pounding. She felt exhilarated, almost happy. Her son was alive. He had done what boys do: he had sneaked out.
She ran through Saint-Henri Square and past the fire hall. The firefighters washing their trucks in the sunshine stopped to watch her—a woman in her forties running hard, the way few women do, with a purpose.
She knew exactly where the house was. Knew exactly what she would find. It was past seven. Luc would be at his desk, hard at work. He would have been there for an hour, maybe more. There would be coffee in the Turkish pot. The place would be full of its dark smell. And he, her husband, would be hammering away at his computer.
It was smaller than she remembered. He had brought her here once—brought his whole class—on a Bonheur d’occasion tour. It was the crowning moment of his Quebec literature course: the strange ship-shaped house of Jean Lévesque. There was no bell on the door, so she knocked. When no one answered, she started pounding with both fists. An elderly woman coming out of the apartment block across the street with two small children paused to watch.
There were no windows on the front of the house, so she couldn’t look inside. She went down the cracked front walk and was about to go around the back when the front door swung open and Luc stuck his head out into the sunshine. His eyes were small, the skin around them puffy and cross-hatched with fine lines. His feet were bare, and he was wearing a bathrobe. His breath, when he finally said her name, came out in a cloud.
“You were sleeping?” she asked, surprised.
He nodded, his eyes avoiding hers. He looked slightly stunned, as if he wasn’t yet fully awake. He didn’t seem to notice the cold. Instead of inviting her inside, he stepped down onto the walk and closed the front door behind him. His feet looked white and vulnerable on the concrete.
“It’s about Hugo,” she said, her voice competing with the traffic. “He’s run away. When I woke up this morning, he was gone.”
He stared at her stupidly, as if the words weren’t registering. “Did you hear me?” she said. “When I looked in his room, the bed hadn’t been slept in. The window was open.” She stopped. His face was still blank. It was like a bad dream. “He used the fire escape,” she said angrily. “Like you used to, remember?”
When Luc still said nothing, she lost her temper. “What is the matter with you?” But even as she formulated the question, she saw the truth. There was someone inside the house, someone he didn’t want her to see.
“He’s here, isn’t he?”
“No,” Luc said quietly.
“If he is, you have to tell me. You have to. I need to know he’s safe.”
He stood there, frozen.
“Luc,” she said. “For God’s sake.”
He lowered his eyes. “There is someone here. But it’s not Hugo.”
“Oh,” she said, as understanding dawned. She could not face this right now.
He looked reluctantly at the door. “It’s probably best you don’t come in.”
“Well, we can’t talk here.”
They agreed he would come to Laporte Street as soon as he could manage. And that she would contact the police. That was that. She turned and walked back up Saint-Augustin Street, retracing the route she had just taken, blind and deaf now to sights and sounds, unaware even of the wind biting at her face.
The outer stairs at Laporte Street were still treacherous with frost. She climbed carefully, holding the railing. Her fingers were so stiff and cold that when she got back inside she could barely dial 9-1-1.
When the police showed up twenty minutes later, she was waiting by the living room window. They got the address wrong and rang at her mother-in-law’s door instead of climbing to the third-floor flat. When they finally came up, Lyse was trailing behind them, pale with panic. “What do you mean, gone?” she kept saying, her voice a high-pitched tremolo.
Luc arrived a moment later, combed and dressed. He’d recovered his composure and proceeded to take charge. There were two officers—a young woman and an older man. He led them to the living room and sat facing them as though his position as head of this household were unchanged, as if he had not been absent and unreachable for the past two weeks. As if he’d given Hugo a single thought during that time.
He answered the questions of the female officer, who did all the asking, in his calm, authoritative way. He smiled at the young woman, even daring to be ironic despite the seriousness of the situation, looking her in the eye when she smiled in response. His voice was deep and sonorous. Everyone in the room was listening, falling under its sway.
“So, you have no idea where he may have gone?” asked the young cop. “He gave no sign of anything last night?”
Hannah had had enough. “My husband wasn’t here last night,” she said.
Luc reddened. “No, no. That’s right. I was out.”
Hannah stared at him in astonishment. “You weren’t out,” she said. “Or strictly speaking you were, but that’s not the point. The point is, you don’t live here anymore. They need to know that, Luc. It’s important.”
Hannah could feel her mother-in-law’s anxious gaze on her. “You don’t live here?” the younger officer asked Luc.
Luc shook his head, but not before giving Hannah an odd look. He wasn’t used to his wife speaking out like this. Neither, frankly, was Hannah. But someone had to, for Hugo’s sake.
“So, when did you move out?” asked the girl. The officers seemed to have taken separate roles. She was doing the talking while the older one watched.
Luc cleared his throat and admitted it had been two weeks. There had been tensions in the family. The officers listened quietly. They knew they were dealing with a celebrity. The young woman took down his new address in her notebook and then turned to Hannah.
“So, you were with Hugo last night, is that right?”
Hannah nodded. “We ate dinner together,” she said, remembering the Kraft noodles.
“And he seemed all right?”
Hannah paused. All right. She had no reference points anymore for what that might mean.
“Madame Lévesque?” said the young woman.
“It’s been a difficult period,” she said. The officer was terribly young, in her mid-twenties. What could she possibly know about faltering marriages and runaway sons? “He’s been in trouble at school,” she said slowly. “And things at home haven’t been the best.”
Luc sprang to his feet. “It’s not as dire as she makes it sound. He’s back in school now. They took him back. He attends a private school. A good one. Saint-Jean-Baptiste,” he said, speaking fast. “They are very strict there. Lots of rules and regulations. He’s been rebelling. Nothing outside of the normal teenage stuff.” He flashed a congenial smile.
The female officer looked at Hannah. “There has been trouble at school?”
Hannah nodded. She told the story of the gun.
The officers exchanged looks. The female officer scribbl
ed something in her notebook, which was small and black and official looking. Her handwriting was large and loopy.
“It wasn’t so serious as that,” said Luc.
The older officer raised his eyebrow. “Showing up at school with a gun?”
“It wasn’t loaded,” said Luc. “It was an antique, a showpiece from the Second World War.”
The woman kept scribbling. She asked for the model and whether it was registered, and where the weapon in question was now.
Luc began to answer, but the young officer waved a hand. “Your wife,” she said. “I’d like your wife to speak.”
Luc sat back down in his chair, the big red velvet armchair that had once been his father’s. His arms were crossed tightly over his chest and he stuck out his long legs, taking up practically the entire space on the living room rug. Hannah’s books were still stacked on the floor beside the couch, and he nudged them with his toe, toppling them.
“Sorry,” he said to the officer. He had interrupted her with the noise. But it was obvious he wasn’t sorry at all. Lyse watched him with wide, worried eyes.
It was the older cop who asked, finally, if Hugo had ever shown signs of being suicidal.
The room went silent. Luc tried to laugh off the suggestion, but the laugh was odd, a single strained note, like the bark of a dog.
“We have to consider it,” the man said. “We have to cover all the bases.”
Lyse jumped up, fluttering her arms like a trapped bird.
“It’s okay, Maman,” said Luc. “Calm down. It’s not that, trust me.”
But his mother wouldn’t be calmed. She burst into tears, and before Hannah could stop her, ran from the room.
PART THREE
20
Hugo stood shivering at the entrance to the Décarie Expressway on-ramp on Sherbrooke Street, holding a handmade cardboard sign. He had no parka or gloves, and his fingers were raw. The sun was up now, a pale yellow balloon without warmth. The real fire, the blazing reds and oranges, had lasted only seconds. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been awake this early. Blink and it was over. The traffic light turned red. He scanned the cars as they slowed. There were lots of them, even though the sun was just rising. He waved his sign and walked up the line, trying not to look scared, bending at every vehicle to look in through the passenger window.
My October Page 20
