My October

by Claire Holden Rothman

  Hugo was looking at her when she opened them. “What are you doing?”

  She told him about an article she’d read in a women’s magazine once, explaining that an egg is impossible to break with your bare hand. It was something she had kept meaning to try. Hugo jumped off the counter, and soon they were both at the sink, squeezing with all their might.

  “Cool,” he said.

  The egg’s shape, Hannah had read, accounted for its strength.

  Hugo brought his hand down with sudden force on the side of the mixing bowl. “Par contre,” he said, switching to French and expertly manipulating the shell so a bright yolk slipped out, perfect and intact, “pour faire une omelette, il faut casser des œufs.”

  He had learned that art—the art of breaking eggs—from his father. As Hannah whipped them into a yellow froth and poured the froth into the pan, and Hugo made toast, she knew there would never be an easy time to raise the subject that must be raised.

  “Hugo, your dad and I …” she began.

  Hugo stopped buttering. “There’s no need, Mom.”

  He was looking straight at her, holding her gaze. “I know you know,” she said. “You’re a smart kid.” She stopped, already annoyed at herself. “Not a kid. What I mean is, you’re old enough to know how people can get into trouble. Love’s not an easy thing.”

  Hugo’s face had darkened. His eyes had slid away from hers.

  “We do love each other,” she continued hastily, but he had turned away. All she could see was the red back of his shirt. But he hadn’t left the room. She pressed on. “Your father needs space right now, Hugo. You know that place he rented? The office on Saint-Augustin Street? He’s living there.”

  The red T-shirt still didn’t move.

  “For now, anyway, it’s his home.”

  Hugo’s shoulders were hunched. Hannah reached out to touch him, but he pulled away. “You’ll still see him. I promise you. You mustn’t worry about losing him.”

  He turned on her. “You really don’t get it, do you? I want to lose him. I’d be perfectly happy never to see—”

  He didn’t get any further. Connie had appeared in the doorway. There was an uncomfortable silence, which Connie broke by stepping into the room. “I thought I heard voices down here. Good heavens, you two are early birds.” If she noticed Hugo’s distress, she gave no indication of it. She walked briskly to the kitchen table, which Hannah had set for two, and sat down.

  Hannah busied herself at the stove. Hugo was in a turmoil, and there was nothing she could do about it with Connie here. Perhaps she could lead him upstairs on some pretext and continue the discussion behind a closed door. Or perhaps she should inform her mother that she’d interrupted a delicate conversation and ask her, politely, to leave. She was trying to come up with a better option when Connie started speaking again, asking about the project and about England. Hugo answered, reluctantly at first, then warming to his subject.

  Hannah looked at the old woman in the pink bathrobe whom she had always thought so meddlesome. This morning, she had shown dignity and tact. And calling Cross had been her idea.

  “Fantastic!” Connie said, hugging Hugo after he told her he’d managed to track Cross down. “Did you speak to him?”

  “No. He was out walking. He takes his dog out on the cliffs every morning and walks for miles, his wife says.”

  “Barbara,” said Connie.

  “Yes, Barbara.” Hugo nodded. “She’s the one I spoke to.”

  “Poor, dear woman.” Connie sighed.

  Hannah stared. Connie was talking as if she knew her.

  “She certainly remembers you,” said Hugo. “Both you and Alfred. She said to send her regards.”

  “I must phone her, now that you’ve got their number.” She laughed her breathy little laugh, looking thoroughly pleased with her grandson’s triumph. “Will he agree to do an interview?”

  Hugo shrugged. “Barbara said I would have to ask him. He doesn’t usually speak to journalists, but I’m not a journalist, am I? She liked the idea of the project, and also the fact of who I am. She told me to call back at noon.”

  “That would be British time,” said Connie. “Five hours ahead of us, right?”

  Hannah glanced at the clock on the stove. “You’ve got ten minutes.”

  Hugo nodded. He didn’t seem angry. He gave Hannah a quick, excited smile, hugged his grandmother, and hurried away to his room.

  “Good luck,” Connie called after him. She turned to Hannah. “What is it they say in French?”

  “Bonne chance?”

  “No,” said Connie. “The dirty one.”

  Hannah smiled. “Merde.”

  “Right,” she said, and shouted the word after her grandson. She turned back to Hannah. “Your son is a remarkable young man. If he can get Jasper to talk—”

  “Jasper?” Hannah repeated.

  Her mother nodded. “That’s what James’s friends called him.”

  “You’re his friend?”

  “Okay,” said Connie, “maybe not his closest one, but we certainly saw them socially. He and Barbara came to the house for dinner. You must have met them. You don’t recall?”

  Hannah shook her head. She dimly remembered parties her parents had thrown, festive affairs that contrasted sharply with Stern family suppers, but she’d stayed upstairs most of the time, hiding away.

  “What they did to Jasper Cross was nightmarish. From what I heard, he never really recovered.”

  Hannah said nothing. They were on dangerous ground. It was the longest conversation they’d had about Quebec in twenty-five years.

  “I know you don’t agree,” said Connie. “But he was someone we knew, Hannah. He wasn’t just a symbol to treat any which way. I have to say, I don’t think it’s ever been properly addressed by anyone in Quebec.”

  Hannah found herself agreeing. Entirely. How odd that her own son seemed bent on righting this historical wrong. The omelettes were ready. She brought them to the table and put the one she’d prepared for Hugo in front of Connie. “You want some breakfast?”

  Connie smiled up at her, nodding. “Good ploy to shut me up.”

  They ate in silence. Hannah was hungry. The eggs were light and buttery, lifting her mood. Her mind, however, kept circling back to the autumn of 1970. She remembered certain things clearly. Bomb scares at her high school. Trooping out with her class to the armoury across the street until the all-clear bell sounded. She and the other students had treated it as a joke, a lark, a welcome excuse to leave their desks. She hadn’t felt a sense of danger. No bombs were ever found. “I don’t remember much from that time,” she said.

  “You were ten years old, Hannah.”

  “Twelve,” Hannah corrected. “I’d just started high school.”

  “Twelve, then, darling. You were young is my point. You’re in a bubble at that age. You of all people should understand that. Your son’s just coming out of it.”

  Her mother was gazing at her food, chewing thoughtfully. The skin around her eyes was scored with fine lines, like a sheet of paper scrunched up and then flattened again. Perhaps Hannah’s bubble had lasted longer than most. Hugo wasn’t the only one who appeared to be awakening.

  “I overheard you, by the way,” Connie said. “When you and Hugo were discussing Luc’s office.”

  Hannah put down her fork.

  “Hannah?”

  She couldn’t lift her eyes. Her father had predicted it. He’d said her marriage would not last.

  A hand reached across the table and stopped just short of her own. It was a familiar hand, veined and sturdy. “I’m so sorry,” said her mother.

  Hannah took the hand. They sat for several seconds in silence, contemplating the unlikely sight.

  There was a yell from upstairs. Then a second yell, full of joy. The two women were on their feet when Hugo came running into the kitchen with his news.

  27

  L uc lay on his back on the futon, listening to his pipes bang. Trappe
d air. He kept forgetting to bleed them, which meant not only that the heat was spotty, but that they made this infernal racket just before dawn. He squinted at the digits on his alarm clock, which he’d placed strategically on the floor near his head. Three fifty-five. Merde.

  He’d been lying here for two hours. He got up, felt his way to the bathroom, and pissed in the dark. Then he groped with both hands like a blind man for the medicine cabinet. It contained two items: a small box of Marie-Soleil’s tampons and Sweet Night, a sleep remedy he had bought a couple of days ago at a health-food store in Mile End. He flipped off the plastic cap and shook two capsules into his palm.

  All week long, he’d been on edge, but tonight he’d toppled over into full-blown insomnia. It was the fault of that boy, that friend of Marie-Soleil’s. What was his name? Arthur something. Saint-Cyr. That was it. The singer. Marie-Soleil called him a genius. They’d gone to the Foufounes to hear him and his band, Les Enfants Terribles.

  “He can recite practically all of Rimbaud by heart,” she’d said as they claimed the only remaining table in the centre of the room, within spitting distance of the stage. The lights shone directly on them, making Luc perspire. He was uneasy going out in public with Marie-Soleil, even to a big anonymous place like the Foufounes, with a crowd of people barely older than his son. All around him, he saw skinny boys with shaved heads and girls in sleeveless tops flaunting perfect flesh.

  The show had been awful. Arthur Saint-Cyr did not have a voice. Or an ear. And he used a synthesizer, which Luc hated. His lyrics were plagiarized from Rimbaud, but cut up and rearranged so that what had once been poetically obscure was now meaningless.

  To dull the pain, Luc had tossed down vodka shots. Three of them, in quick succession. Then things had unravelled. He’d argued with Saint-Cyr, who had come to sit with them between sets. That was why Luc was lying sleepless and alone on a Saturday night. Marie-Soleil had sided with her friend, and Luc had stalked off, his mouth dry and his head throbbing, while she stayed where she was.

  He tossed the herbal capsules into his mouth and bent over the tap, slurping greedily. He couldn’t handle liquor anymore. He’d never really been able to—it gave him headaches and disrupted his sleep—but these days he couldn’t endure it. What had he been thinking, ordering vodka? He must have seemed pitiful.

  The grout where the bathroom sink attached to the wall was black at the edges. It wasn’t just dirt, he knew. Dirt doesn’t grow fur. He sniffed it and made a face. Why hadn’t he noticed it before he signed the lease? It wasn’t as though the fat man had hidden it. And even if he’d tried, the smell would have revealed the truth. So far, Luc had no runny nose or itchy eyes, but something so ugly had to be bad for him.

  When he opened his eyes again, the sun was in his face. The clock showed 11:11. Below the time was the date: October 28, 2001. Luc sat up. It was the anniversary of his father’s death.

  His mouth tasted like ashes. He walked to the bathroom, where he urinated prodigiously and then drank from the tap, holding his breath to block out the stink from the awful black crack.

  Thirty-five years ago today, Roland Lévesque had stuck the barrel of a Luger into his mouth. Every single autumn since then, Luc had relived it. It explained his mood. Even if he hadn’t been conscious of it, some part of him had remembered. His limbs were still heavy from the herbal pills. He wished he could draw the curtains and sleep some more. But he had no curtains. And sleep wouldn’t return now. He’d misbehaved last night, but that was the least of it. He’d caught a glimpse of himself as an outsider might see him—an aging philanderer pretending he had something in common with children.

  He took a shower, and while the water trickled down— the pressure was woeful, another thing he’d neglected to check before signing with Gagnon—he realized what he must do.

  IT WAS JUST PAST ONE in the afternoon when he knocked on his mother’s door. She didn’t hear him immediately because she was out on the back porch, hanging laundry.

  “This could be my last line of the season,” she said, nodding at the clothes waving in the breeze. “The forecast is for frost tonight.”

  “You know what day it is?” he asked, rubbing his temples. He had a brutal headache.

  Lyse nodded. “After I finish here, I’m going to the cemetery. Want to join me?”

  He shook his head. After thirty-five years, she was still laying flowers at her husband’s grave. That was love. He looked out over the rooftops, suddenly too sad for words. When he turned back, Lyse was scrutinizing him, a man’s shirt bunched in her hands.

  “Whose is that?” he asked.

  She said Graeme White had been helping her fix something and had stained it. The shirt billowed in the wind, incongruously big among her dainty white things.

  Luc had forgotten how calming his mother’s presence could be. He’d barely seen her since he’d left Laporte Street, and he realized he’d missed her. After she finished with the laundry, they went back inside to warm up. She sat in her rocking chair, the one with white cushions in which she’d breast-fed him and later Rémi. For some reason, this thought affected him. Tears came into his eyes. She saw them.

  “Is it your father?”

  “Yes,” he said. And then, “No. It’s me.”

  She didn’t say a word. She just sat, waiting for him to explain.

  “The day Hugo was born, I swore to myself that I would never leave. Whatever happened, I’d stick by him. And now look. I’m almost fifty. The same age Dad was when he left.”

  Lyse shook her head. “He didn’t just leave.”

  “When he died, then.”

  “When he shot himself,” she said. “You are not remotely like him.”

  “Yes I am,” he said quietly. “Only I used a girl instead of a gun.”

  “A girl?”

  He told his mother about Marie-Soleil and the place on Saint-Augustin Street. She listened in silence, her face still and sad.

  “It’s not what you think,” he said at last.

  “Oh?” she said evenly. “And what do I think?”

  “That it’s a mid-life crisis, the tired old story of a man who can’t face his own decline.”

  Lyse studied him.

  “It isn’t, Maman. You don’t know. You picked someone from your own culture, someone who could understand you, someone similar to you.”

  Lyse took a breath and let it out slowly. “That’s not true,” she said.

  She leaned back in the rocking chair. “I owe you this,” she said quietly, and began to speak of Graeme White, the man who had been her friend and lover and soulmate for nearly thirtyseven years.

  Luc stared at her. “Thirty-seven? That’s not possible,” he said, more harshly than he’d intended. “That’s longer than Dad’s been dead.” His throat was hurting suddenly, his voice straining. “What are you saying? Did he know?”

  His mother nodded.

  Luc’s stomach seemed to twist. “I don’t believe it.”

  Lyse began to cry.

  Luc shook his head wearily. Admitting this had taken courage. He put a hand on his mother’s shoulder. “Don’t cry, Maman. It’s okay.”

  She shook her head. “No, it’s not. You’ve been honest with me. I can at least return the favour. I tried to protect you and your brother, but you didn’t need protection, Luc. Or maybe you did once, but not now. Not for years. It wasn’t you I was protecting all this time. I was afraid you’d condemn me.”

  And so she told him the story, the true story, of Roland Lévesque. It was a painful telling, with no hero at its heart, no redemption, nothing remotely uplifting in its outcome. Roland Lévesque had been a failure as a husband. He’d failed to be faithful. He’d failed to be sober. He’d failed to provide, and failed, in the end, even to remain alive.

  Luc remembered the drinking. Certain nights, his father’s friends had carried him home from the tavern. But that was normal, Luc had told himself. It was something men of that generation did. The tavern, like the Green Spot, had
been a social club.

  “He was an alcoholic,” Lyse said, as if answering his thoughts. “He had a problem, a serious one, and didn’t have the strength to face it. He paid a high price. It cost him his marriage and his job.”

  “That wasn’t alcoholism,” Luc objected. His father had told him the story a hundred times. He’d fought for the workers. He’d defended their rights. That was why Imperial had gotten rid of him.

  But Lyse was shaking her head. “He was caught drunk, Luc.

  On the job. It could have been fatal, for him and for others. A fire broke out in a basement storeroom at the plant. The alarm went off and the firemen came, but no one was there to open up for them. They had to smash down the door. Your father was found asleep in the infirmary. They thought maybe he’d crawled in there overcome by smoke, but when they shook him, he woke up. There was a whisky bottle under the cot.”

  “All right,” said Luc. “You can stop.”

  But Lyse didn’t stop. “The drinking got worse after he was fired. Once, he’d been a gentle man. He was funny and charming. Then he turned angry and got into arguments over nothing at all. I did what I could, paying the bills and such, shielding you boys from the worst of it. It went on for two awful years. By the end, we were barely talking. He wasn’t home much, which was probably a blessing. One night,” she said, looking out the window at her clothesline, “your father asked me if I was seeing another man. Someone must have said something to him. Or maybe it was just intuition. I hadn’t been planning to tell him, but he asked. And I told him the truth.”

  She sat back in her chair, hugging her arms. “They found him that night at the Westmount lookout.”

  “You didn’t kill him,” he said, taking her in his arms. “If that’s what you thought, you were wrong. Do you hear me?”

  After a while, they went to her kitchen, the same kitchen in which he had sat as a boy, and put the ancient tin kettle on the stove for tea. From the shelf over the sink, she took down the stained teapot she’d used since his childhood, and the matching bowl from which he and Rémi had stolen sugar cubes to suck like candy.