She’d had a son, not the daughter her doctor had confidently predicted. He was napping when Hannah had last spoken with her, in the pink room that Allison had so meticulously prepared for a little girl. The birth had not taken place at home, as Allison had hoped. Despite the Lamaze baths and massages and ethnic lullabies sung by her doula, all of which Allison described to Hannah in great detail over the telephone, Allison had ended up having a C-section in an operating room of Toronto’s largest hospital.
“Nothing went the way I’d planned,” Allison had reported, laughing with what sounded like genuine mirth. “But you know what? That’s just fine.”
Hannah could have said the same. Her parents were still struggling in the aftermath of her father’s stroke, but she felt closer to them than she had in years. Luc’s departure hadn’t been such a disaster either. It had led her to Manny Mandelbaum, initially for Hugo, but then to help her sort out her own confusion. He had helped her understand that her career as a translator was over. In October, this had seemed like a calamity, but now, nearly nine months later, it was a simple fact. Translation no longer interested her. On Manny’s counsel, she had kept her contract with the Word Press but farmed out the last chapters of Dreamer to a young woman who had just graduated from the translation department at Concordia University.
And she had started to read fiction again. Not searching for books to translate, but the way she had read years ago when she was young, eclectically and for pleasure. She had found her old copy of Bonheur d’occasion, dog-eared and marked up, from her days at Dawson College. What she found in its pages surprised her. It wasn’t anything like Luc’s novels, despite what the critics claimed. The setting was Saint-Henri, as in Luc’s books. And the characters were working class, like Luc’s characters. But the similarities ended there.
What struck her in Bonheur were the voices. Weary Rose-Anna and her dreamer of a husband, Azarius. Flighty, self-involved Florentine Lacasse and her equally self-involved lover, Jean Lévesque, all of them so closely observed that it was easy to forget they were fictional. Gabrielle Roy’s emotional antennae picked up frequencies missed by most people and transmitted them whole and true in her writing. Hannah had forgotten how she had once known each member of the Lacasse clan as intimately as the members of her own family. She told all of this to Manny Mandelbaum, whom she was still visiting periodically, and whose expensive Westmount office rent she was now helping to subsidize. She wasn’t sure she would call it therapy— it felt more like chatting with a friend—but it was helping.
The young translator’s work on Dreamer had been excellent. After Hannah finished the edits, she had no more excuses. At the Bureau en Gros, she bought a Hilroy notebook with three subject dividers and a pack of econo-brand ballpoint pens. And she began. This also had been inspired by Manny. His definition of adulthood could be applied to other types of people—writers of fiction, for instance. It was all about telling someone’s story, getting under the skin, catching the intricate truth of personal history.
Hannah still wasn’t sure what it was that she had begun, or what shape it might eventually take. But she knew she wanted voices. More than one, and each of them telling a story. She wanted a character, based loosely on Alfred Stern, whose voice would be extinguished. She wanted a boy like her son at this precise moment, age fourteen, daring to speak out. She wanted a writer like Luc, with his bright eye and his oh-so-human heart. And she wanted a woman facing the difficulties she had faced, a translator who for reasons she didn’t understand found herself unable to translate.
Eventually, she would have to let Luc know about the project. He had been dropping by with increasing frequency, supposedly to help finish the film, but occasionally staying on after the work was done and joining her and Hugo for dinner. So far, she had kept her writing a secret, but she couldn’t keep it from him forever. Every day, she sat a little longer at her desk in the pantry, filling the spiral notebook with words. This book, or whatever it would turn out to be, was no longer inside her. Quite the contrary. It had swallowed her up, and she knew that sooner or later Luc or Hugo would ask about it. By that time, she hoped, she would have figured out what to say.
BOOKS, FILMS, AND WEBSITES REFERRED TO IN THIS NOVEL
“The British Diplomatic Oral History Programme,” 1996, www.chu.cam.ac.uk/archives/collections/BDOHP/Cross.pdf.
Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Constance Farrington. New York: Grove Press, 1963. Reprint, London: Penguin Classics, 2001. Originally published as Les damnés de la terre, 1961.
Kaufman, Fred. Searching for Justice: An Autobiography. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005.
Leblanc, Carl. L’Otage (The Hostage). Ad Hoc Films, 2004.
Rosenberg, Marshall B. Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life. Encinitas, CA: PuddleDancer Press, 2003.
Roy, Gabrielle. The Tin Flute. Translated by Alan Brown. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1980. Originally published as Bonheur d’occasion, 1945.
Vallières, Pierre. White Niggers of America: The Precocious Autobiography of a Quebec “Terrorist.” Translated by Joan Pinkham. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1971. Originally published as Nègres blancs d’Amérique: Autobiographie précoce d’un “terroriste” québécois, 1968.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
First of all, I am indebted to Carl Leblanc for his fine, probing film L’Otage (The Hostage), which filled me with questions and inspired this novel.
Véronique Boscart of the E.W. Bickle Centre for Complex Continuing Care and the late Electra Risacher offered generous assistance while I was researching strokes and aphasia. Archivist Phil Gold of Sunnybrook Hospital provided invaluable historical details about that Toronto institution. Michael Rudder took me on a personal tour of Laporte Street in Saint-Henri, and the Saint-Henri Historical Society helped me research the novel’s setting. Its “Gabrielle Roy Tour” pamphlet and map were particularly useful. For research about English-speaking Montreal families and the October Crisis, I extend my thanks to Sheila Goldbloom and Fred Kaufman (who also provided editorial input on the manuscript). For research about the anglophone exodus, I thank Collin Mills.
I am deeply grateful to my agent, Samantha Haywood of the Transatlantic Literary Agency, and to her associate Shaun Bradley, for buoying my spirits at key moments in the creative process and, more generally, for handling all the real-world issues that arise as one turns an idea into a manuscript and a manuscript into a book. Shima Aoki of Penguin Canada, with her delicate, probing questions, and sharp-eyed Alex Schultz, helped me arrive at a final draft. I thank my partner in life, Arthur Holden, for the attentive care he bestowed on this book at various stages, and—just as importantly—on its author.
Finally, I want to express my gratitude to the Canada Council for the Arts, provider of the generous grant that financed the first draft of My October.
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First published 2014
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Copyright © Claire Holden Rothman, 2014
Crown copyright information taken from James Richard Cross’s testimonial in the British Diplomatic Oral History Programme, Foreign and Commonwealth Office, 1996, is re-used under the terms of the Open Government Licence (U.K.).
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LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
Rothman, Claire, 1958–, author
My October / Claire Holden Rothman.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-0-14-318867-4 (pbk.)
I. Title.
PS8585.O8435M92 2014 C813’.54 C2014-902412-6
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