The O'Briens

by Peter Behrens

  “Jesus, Joe, we ran away from real life to get this far, didn’t we?”

  “You’re not making any sense.”

  “We could have stayed in the bush. That was plenty real, wasn’t it.” Grattan smiled and sipped champagne. “Think about it, Joe. Here we are, lunching at the Ritz. We’re as far from where we started as the Argentine is from here. Mental and spiritual distance. We’ve come this far, both of us. Don’t see why I can’t go a little farther.”

  “Just what have you accomplished so far? Besides killing thirteen men. Probably fellows a lot like yourself.”

  “Jesus, Joe.” Grattan slumped forward, gazing into his champagne glass. He had on one of his beautiful English suits, a fine worsted, better than the suits Joe ordered for himself at Brooks Brothers in New York. Probably Grattan still owed his tailor. Or perhaps someone else, some hero-worshipper, had picked up the tab.

  “Do you ever try to add up, Joe, everything you’ve seen and done in your life?” Grattan’s tone had shifted from exuberance to plowing unease. “Christ, adding up everything I’ve done, places I’ve been — that used to feel wonderful. Remember saying goodbye on the platform at Ottawa? Hell, I was scared. Dropped the girls off at the Visitations. Went on to Toronto, then Chicago. Met a woman on the train. Got off at Denver and she took me to a hotel — married woman, husband in Colorado Springs — never told you about her, did I? Lost my cherry at Brown’s Hotel in Denver. Got back on the train next morning. The orange grove at Santa Barbara . . . I didn’t like those Franciscans much, those sandals and brown robes — an eerie bunch. Hired on at a cattle ranch in the Santa Ynez Valley. Awful dusty. Met Elise at Ocean Park, snapping pictures on the boardwalk — that was an adventure, meeting Elise. Selling house lots for Abbot. Elise getting pregnant, us getting married. The priest at St. Monica’s refusing to marry us on account of her being a Jew. Virginia’s birth. My life handled like a book in those days: I could open it at any page I wanted and go on from there.”

  The café had been filling with lunch patrons, including men Joe had done business with, most considerably older than his brother, men who would not have served overseas.

  “What about you, Joe?” Grattan said, looking up.

  “I don’t even know what it is you’re asking.” He had hoped his brother’s feet were planted on solid ground at last, but they weren’t, and probably never would be.

  “Do you feel it all connects, Joe? I can’t seem to find the connection from one part of my life to another. Can’t hold it in one hand anymore like a book. A lot I seem to have forgotten. The war — I really ought to think more about the war. A lot happened. I ought to think about it, but there’s never enough time.”

  Joe was observing two men whom the maitre d’ was obsequiously showing to a banquette. One of them he recog-nized: Louis-Philippe Taschereau, KC, a courtly lawyer who represented the Archdiocese of Montreal in civil matters. As one of the parish wardens of the Ascension of Our Lord, the new English-speaking church in Westmount, he had met with Taschereau a couple of times to review deeds and construction contracts. The lawyer had recently built himself a house not far from where Joe and Iseult were building. Taschereau’s lunch partner was dressed like an American college man, in a grey flannel suit and a shirt with a button-down collar. His dark hair was sleekly groomed.

  “I used to feel life accumulating, page by page,” Grattan was saying. “I was learning by experience. I’ve lost that feeling.”

  Joe turned to his brother. “South America isn’t a plan. It amounts to desertion, if you want to hear the truth. You’ll lose everything worth having.”

  “Captain O’Brien?”

  The young collegian, Taschereau’s lunch partner, was standing by their table. He made a very slight bow. “Baruch Cohen.”

  Grattan looked blank.

  “Second Lieutenant Cohen. I was with the 199th in France. Buck Cohen.”

  “Oh Lord, yes,” said Grattan, squinting. “When exactly were you with us?”

  Joe couldn’t tell if his brother remembered Cohen or not.

  Cohen seemed perfectly at ease. “Well, I took over a platoon in Major Murphy’s company on the night of the seventh of July, 1917. We were in the trenches at Arras. You, Major Murphy, and Captain Grimstead were the company commanders. I was hit a couple of hours later, a blighty. Three months’ recovery in England. When I returned to battalion, Murphy and Grimstead were dead. So were all the platoon commanders, and you’d joined the RFC.”

  Grattan rubbed his jaw and stared blankly at Cohen, who turned to Joe. “If you’re Captain O’Brien’s brother, I know you by reputation, sir. You’re one of the railway men.”

  “Used to be.”

  “A pleasure to meet you, Mr. O’Brien.”

  The Jew had better manners than most ex-officers Joe had met. Buck Cohen was slight and youthful, though tightness around his eyes made him seem a little older.

  “You at McGill?” Joe asked.

  “Oh no.” Buck Cohen smiled. “I pursued studies before the war, but my university days are over.”

  “Don’t you miss it at all?” Grattan said, somewhat hungrily.

  “University?”

  “The war.”

  “I can’t say I do. I’m keeping busy. Still a lot of catching up to do. The war seems an awfully long time ago.”

  “I was talking to my brother about South America,” Grattan said. “What do you think about South America?”

  “Very little, to tell you the truth. Where are you working now, may I ask?”

  “I’m selling cow pasture in the Town of Mount Royal. Only no one’s buying.”

  Joe told himself he had never wanted to boss his brother. He’d just wanted Grattan to be safe. Maybe it came down to the same thing. Maybe he didn’t really know how to be a good brother, or husband, or father. He’d acquired no wisdom, had nothing deep and learned to go on. All he’d ever had to guide him was raw feelings and instinct, and when he was in a self-justifying mood, he told himself these amounted to love.

  “You might come and see me sometime, Captain,” Buck Cohen was saying. “My operation is growing. Other things being equal, I prefer working with men who’ve been overseas.”

  “What business are you in, Cohen?” Joe asked.

  Cohen shrugged. “Import-export.”

  “What do you handle?”

  “Oh, pretty much anything.” Taking out a small leather notebook and a gold pencil, Cohen jotted something on a slip of paper and handed it to Grattan. “If you ring my secretary she’ll schedule an appointment. Do come round. A pleasure running into you, Captain O’Brien. I enjoy meeting fellows from the old battalion. Doesn’t happen that often. They were wicked days, weren’t they?”

  “Wicked?” Grattan smiled slowly. “That’s the word. Wicked they were. Wicked were we. Here’s to the dead, boys.” He raised his champagne glass in a toast.

  Without hesitating, Cohen picked up Joe’s water tumbler and clicked glasses with Grattan.

  “The dead boys,” Buck Cohen said.

  ~

  Joe’s office had an abundance of gold leaf on the ceiling and an enormous fireplace where a log fire was cracking and glowing. It was November. A few snowflakes had been swirling among the grey buildings, but now the slots of sky were hard blue, and down in the square the pavement was mostly bare, with only a dusting of snow on the King-Emperor’s shoulders.

  On Pine Avenue a car and driver were standing by to whisk Iseult to the Royal Victoria Hospital at a moment’s notice. After two flawless births at Santa Barbara’s Cottage Hospital she had wanted to have this baby at home, but he would not consider it.

  He knew when she saw snow flying she would remember the baby they had lost in the mountains. People always would remember what had hurt them. What gave them pleasure they let go of pretty quickly.

  His secretary buzzed and said his sister-in-law was on the line. Assuming Elise was calling to ask about Iseult’s condition, he picked up his desk phone. “No news y
et, Elise.”

  “Joe, Grattan never came home last night. I’m awful worried.”

  Grattan had not mentioned ranching on the pampas since their lunch at the Ritz. Early in the fall he had scratched his leg on barbed wire while hopping a fence to show clients a piece of land. The scratch had become infected, and for a while it had looked as if he might lose the leg, but the wound had finally healed.

  “Have you tried calling his office?” Joe asked.

  “I did, first thing. No one’s seen him since before lunch yesterday.” Elise sounded calm, but he knew she wouldn’t have called unless she was worried.

  “How has he seemed lately?” he asked cautiously.

  “How do you mean?”

  “Since he got out of hospital. Sold any lots?”

  “Joe, it’s Armistice Day.”

  He lit a cigarette. “What exactly are you thinking, Elise?”

  “You know what I’m thinking.” She started to cry.

  It was the first time he had heard someone crying over a telephone wire, and he was dismayed by how helpless it made him feel. Holding the receiver to his ear, he spun his desk chair and looked out across the city to the Royal Victoria Hospital, a grim, grey Scottish castle on the silver flank of Mount Royal.

  “You think he’s had another accident?”

  “If you want to call it that.”

  “What would you call it?”

  “I don’t want to call it anything, Joe. I just want him home! This time of year he always gets crazy. I want him to be all right. Oh God.”

  “Ellie, listen, he’s probably out on a tear. If you’d been downtown this morning you’d have seen the vets on St. Catherine Street, celebrating. They’ve been at it since last night. He’s probably celebrating too, the fool.”

  Elise sniffled. “It could be, Joe. Maybe he’s tying one on. It could be that.”

  Joe looked at his wristwatch. “The Governor General’s unveiling the new war memorial in Dominion Square in an hour. There’ll be a crowd. I’ll bet Grattan shows up. I’ll walk over and see if I can’t find him.”

  “Joe, what if he went in the river?” Her voice sounded small and far away. “They’ll never find him then; they’ll never fish him out.”

  “Don’t think that way. He’ll turn up.”

  “He isn’t strong, Joe. He isn’t. Not like you.”

  She was weeping again. His sister-in-law was almost as tough as he was but she’d probably been dreading Armistice Day for weeks. She must have had a sleepless night.

  “I’m going to the unveiling. I’ll call you as soon as I find out anything.” He hung up the phone.

  The newspapers had been referring to the new war memorial as the “Cenotaph,” whatever that meant. When people feared a thing, they dressed it in language to blur its shape. Dead soldiers were now “the fallen.” Death in the war was “sacrifice.”

  Rising from his desk, he walked over to the windows. Bits of snow were swirling again between grey buildings. The sky was pale and looked cold. He ought to get hold of his driver and make sure he had chains ready for mounting on the tires. The streets approaching the Royal Victoria were the steepest in the city.

  Intending to check the weather forecast, he picked up a copy of the Montreal Herald that lay folded on his desk. The front-page story was yet another gun battle in Vermont between rumrunners and hijackers. Two Italians from Montreal had been found shot to death in a highway ditch outside St. Albans. There had been many similar stories lately in the Herald. Every night, trucks loaded with Canadian liquor sped down the back roads of New England, headed for New York City. He’d recently heard that Louis-Philippe Taschereau’s young client Buck Cohen was one of New York’s major suppliers of contraband liquor, and on his way to becoming one of the richest men in the Dominion of Canada.

  A thought struck him. Joe crossed the room and opened his door. His secretary, Miss Esther Dalrymple, looked up from her desk.

  “Get Louis-Philippe Taschereau on the line, please.”

  “Certainly. Oh, Mr. O’Brien?”

  “Yes?”

  “The girls at the switchboard are holding a line free in case Mrs. O’Brien calls.”

  “Excellent. Thank you.” He respected Protestants like Miss Dalrymple, who lived with her mother in Verdun. She was not beautiful but she was punctual, efficient, and quick. A few moments later, Taschereau’s office was on the line.

  “I connect you now,” a French-Canadian secretarial voice intoned.

  “Oui? Monsieur O’Brien? Comment allez-vous?”

  “Ça va bien, merci. Et vous?”

  Joe deployed his lumber-camp French for the polite preliminaries before switching to English. “M’sieu, the reason I called is that I’ve a brother who may be in some trouble down below the border.” It was a guess, but his hunches had often proved correct.

  “Well, I’m sorry to hear that,” said the lawyer. “What sort of trouble?”

  “He may have been doing some trucking business down there.”

  There was a pause.

  “Your brother? This would be Captain O’Brien?”

  “Yes. The fact is, he never came home last night. One of your clients has trucking interests, and I thought he might have heard something.”

  There was silence at the other end of the line. Had he annoyed Taschereau by referring to his connection with a rumrunner? He didn’t know the lawyer well. On the other hand, it was a fact that Taschereau represented Cohen, who had sold more liquor last year than anyone else in the world, according to a story in the Toronto Telegram.

  “Well,” said Taschereau, “these matters are obscure to me, but I can certainly try to find out.”

  “If something’s happened I wouldn’t want his wife to find out from the newspapers.”

  The lawyer sighed. “These people . . . ” He let the sentence trail away.

  Your clients, you mean, Joe thought. “Thank you, monsieur. I’m much obliged.”

  “Not at all. I’ll call you by the end of the day.”

  Joe next placed a call to his home. Iseult’s voice came clearly over the wire. “Nothing to report,” she said. “This is getting very boring.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Sitting in the sunroom and looking through Vanity Fair.”

  She usually spent three days a week at the Sainte-Cunégonde clinic, delousing children, keeping records, and paying bills, but she had agreed to stop going there until after the baby was born.

  “I feel like a beached whale, Joe. I don’t like this house. I can’t wait to be in our own home.”

  “You haven’t spoken with Elise this morning, have you?”

  “No. Why? Is anything wrong?”

  “Grattan didn’t come home last night. And it’s Armistice Day.”

  “Oh, Joe.”

  “I’m going to Dominion Square. They’re unveiling the war memorial. Maybe I’ll see him there.”

  ~

  In Dominion Square, hundreds of people wrapped in overcoats stamped their feet against the bright cold. Women clutched wreaths, sprays of poppies in cellophane, lilies wrapped in newspaper. There were red-cheeked schoolboy cadets and plenty of young men wearing medals, but women outnumbered the men. The sky had cleared, the wind was sharp, and the light snow that had fallen was being tossed around on hard ground.

  A flight of pigeons whipped overhead. The Governor General and an array of officers and aides-de-camp were on the reviewing stand in their polished boots, with moustaches and chests of ribbons, clutching leather riding crops. The Anglican bishop of Montreal was addressing the crowd in an elderly Englishman’s quaver: “Sacrifice . . . gallant . . . glorious . . . Empire . . . blessed . . . ” Joe couldn’t tell if he was speechifying or praying, the words were being tossed around so by the wind.

  The crowd was dense near the new war memorial but there was plenty of open space in the square: acres of frozen yellow grass and brown flowerbeds. The South African War Memorial — a bronze cavalry trooper holdi
ng down a restless bronze horse — was on the other side, opposite the new Sun Life Building. He usually ignored it, but sometimes, on his way to the train station and New York City, he stopped and read the inscription.

  TO

  COMMEMORATE

  THE HEROIC DEVOTION OF THE

  CANADIANS WHO FELL IN THE

  SOUTH AFRICAN WAR

  AND THE VALOUR OF THEIR COMRADES

  Heroic, devotion, valour — ten-dollar words. Abandonment, early sorrow, and poverty were the plain real words, and they ought to have left space on their monument for a few of them.

  Looking up, he saw bare branches, wild sky, and restless pigeons. It was warmer within the pack of bodies, sharing heat. The brand-new monument — the Cenotaph — just unsheathed, stood twenty feet tall. No bronze figures, no decoration, just polished granite fitted together almost seamlessly. It was good stone. He wondered where it had been quarried and at what price.

  Archbishop Bruchési was speaking in French and Joe felt the mostly English crowd getting restless. War had divided the city, with French Canadians rioting against conscription. All that was supposed to be forgotten now.

  The Archbishop shifted to Latin for his benediction, and as Joe scanned for his brother the crowd began singing a Protestant hymn, “O God, Our Help in Ages Past.” A dowdy middle-aged woman clutching a wreath was escorted to the foot of the Cenotaph by a cadet, and Joe felt a narrow slice of pain enter his chest as he watched her lay the tribute. He would kill anyone who threatened his Mike. If they came at his boy waving their flags, he’d kill them.

  He glanced at his watch. Just about eleven o’clock. Out on Dorchester Boulevard cars and trucks were pulling over to the curb. Buildings and sidewalk grates still spewed steam and smoke, but the noise of the city had abruptly died away. The silence — a novelty in 1919, dogma now — was being strictly observed.

  The railway men hated it, he knew. It played hell with the timetables. People were making a fetish out of remembering the war when most of them would be better off forgetting all about it. Life ran forward, never back.