The O'Briens

by Peter Behrens

  He gripped his walking stick. This was his city now, a shining collection of death and memory. Opposite the South African War Memorial, the Sun Life Insurance Company was building a new headquarters, the biggest building in the British Empire. Saint-Jacques Cathedral, St. George’s Anglican, the battlements of Windsor Station — all grey stone, coldness. There was permanence here, and he liked that. Everything he had done had brought him this far.

  A sharp squawk broke the silence and a murmur of disapproval passed through the crowd. Another squawk, a little louder — then some notes scratched the air, a lick of melody, and he suddenly realized that someone, somewhere, was playing a fiddle.

  Looking across the square he spotted his brother, the tallest in a group of five or six other men, all wearing trench coats except one fellow in a woollen cap and mackinaw, who was striking away at a fiddle perched at his neck. The tune snarling across the frozen silence was “Cheticamp Jig,” one of the bawdy pieces Mick Heaney used to play.

  The two minutes ended. Official silence began to loosen and dissolve. People started chatting, stamping their feet, coughing. Out on Dorchester Boulevard the automobiles began moving. Streetcars jangled their bells and resumed their metallic slither, but above everything Joe could still hear the taunting, raucous fiddle.

  He started towards his brother.

  Grattan saw him coming and saluted. “Hello, Joe! Cold enough for you?”

  “What the hell are you doing here?”

  “Same as everyone, I guess.”

  The fiddler had moved a little way off and seemed to be locked in a furious struggle with his instrument, bow flying and music sputtering into the cold air, banging into the brutish surround of stone buildings. With his black hair and chipped face he could be an Indian, a Caughnawaga Mohawk from across the river.

  Joe shuddered. The squawking notes were like insects pecking at him, needles jabbing. “Where the hell have you been, Grattan?”

  The velvet collar of Grattan’s cashmere overcoat was turned up against the cold. Joe had always been secretly proud of his younger brother’s distinguished appearance. No one looking at Grattan would ever guess he’d been raised in the clearings.

  “You’ve been running whisky for Buck Cohen, haven’t you?”

  Grattan nodded. “I sure have, Joe. Delivered a cargo at Stockbridge, Mass., last night and ran straight back. Jesus, it was cold in the truck.”

  “You got shot, didn’t you? Back in September. It wasn’t any goddamn barbed wire.”

  Grattan shrugged. “Bullet just scratched me, but it wasn’t clean.”

  “Let’s get out of here,” Joe said. “Walk back to the office with me. I’ve had a telephone call from Elise. You’d better speak to her.”

  Grattan shook hands with a couple of the men in trench coats, then he and Joe started across the square. The fiddler was still playing but his melody was slower now, not a jig. Mournful. A lament.

  “What the hell did he bring that goddamn thing to a wreath-laying for?” Joe said.

  “Don’t know. There were a few Caughnawagas in the battalion. Joe, I couldn’t tell Elise or she would have made a fuss. I make two hundred bucks for a night’s work and don’t have to do anything but ride along. Buck’s always worried about his trucks getting jumped.”

  “What are you, some sort of gunner for the gangsters? Is that what you’ve come to, Grattan?”

  “Well, I haven’t done much gunning, but that’s what it comes down to, in a pinch.”

  “Did you see the paper this morning?”

  “That wasn’t us. We stay clear of St. Albans.”

  They were passing brown flowerbeds, bare and lumpy. Feeling overwhelmed, Joe suddenly halted. “I can’t stand that music.”

  “Pay it no mind, brother. Let’s go someplace warm. I could use a nice lunch.”

  A small ache in Joe’s chest was radiating into his shoulder and right arm, tingling down to the elbow. His eyelashes were sticky with tears as he stared down at his shoes. He was wearing doeskin spats, buttoned up the sides. When had he started wearing spats? A year ago? Ridiculous things. Grattan didn’t wear spats.

  “Grattan, do you suppose Mick Heaney is dead?”

  “Christ, I sure hope so. I used to dream of running into him in France.”

  “I wish we’d killed him when we had the chance.”

  “Well, we damn near did. Where’ll we lunch? How about the Piccadilly? My treat.”

  They resumed walking. Joe had heard of businessmen suffering heart attacks in the middle of the day. At the Montreal Amateur Athletic Association pool, where he swam twice a week, he’d overheard a member compare the pain of his heart attack to being shot in the breast at dawn by a firing squad. Was he going to keel over and die in Dominion Square?

  “I’ll call Elise from the Pic,” Grattan was saying. “Last night was the easiest two hundred bucks I ever made. Drank coffee all the way down, slept all the way home.”

  Joe’s legs were shorter than his brother’s and he had to exert himself to keep up. The pain in his chest seemed to be fading.

  At the Piccadilly Tea Room on St. Catherine Street, they were shown to a small table near the window. He rarely went out for lunch. When he did it was a business lunch, usually at one of the downtown clubs, the Mount Royal or the St. James, where he was respectable enough to be offered lunch but not membership. Along with a few French Canadians, the Scots had their cold hands on the wealth of the city, which they had been piling up since the days of the fur trade. An Irishman would never be invited to join their clubs until he got so rich they couldn’t ignore him.

  A pretty waitress in a stained uniform brought their menus and Grattan headed off to the manager’s office to telephone Elise. The café was warm, steamy, and noisy. Conversations were in English and French. Women sat with their furs draped over the backs of their chairs. Most people wore Flanders poppies on their lapels and few men wore war ribbons. Grattan had not worn his decorations.

  Thirteen enemy planes. Thirteen dead German flyers equalled one DSO. Maybe all it signified was that Grattan was crazy.

  Grattan returned from the manager’s office looking sheepish.

  “Reach her?” Joe asked.

  Grattan nodded.

  “Am I supposed to lie for you?” Joe said. “Or did you tell her where you were?”

  “She really ran me rough, Joe. Really hauled me over the coals.”

  “Did you tell her you’re finished with the rumrunner business?”

  “Well, Joe, you’re the boss.”

  “No, I’m not. Take responsibility for your own life.”

  “Sure, sure. You are my big brother, though.”

  It was Friday, and Joe ordered salmon on brown bread. Grattan hesitated and then ordered the same. As soon as the waitress left he slipped out a flask and added a dollop of amber whisky to his water glass, then glanced at Joe.

  “No, I don’t want any.” He had no taste for liquor when he didn’t need it.

  “I was on my way to grab a bite for lunch yesterday afternoon when Buck pulled over in a great black touring car and offered me the run. The trucks were already loaded when we got to the warehouse. There wasn’t time to phone Elise.”

  “What about the other times?”

  “I always told her I was out with the boys.”

  In many ways Joe felt closer to his sister-in-law than to his brother, respected her more, yet he and Grattan carried the same seed of whatever it was — mud, blood, hardship. He wouldn’t anoint his own children with that legacy. They would come of age in safety in Upper Westmount.

  After their food arrived the brothers ate in silence. The plate-glass window facing St. Catherine Street was steamed from the cold outside and the moisture and warmth within. Grattan hardly touched his pepped-up water glass — he never had been much of a drinker. There had always been something fastidious about him. Which was why those wartime letters, with their mamzelles, cunts, and prostitutes fucking on trains, had been so shocking. T
he war had cut Grattan loose from decent life, like a kite with a broken string.

  While Grattan was putting down money to pay the bill, the waitress returned and said there was a call for him on the telephone in the manager’s office. He glanced at Joe, shrugged, and left to take the call. Joe wondered if Buck Cohen had somehow tracked down his brother and wanted him for another job. Another whisky run.

  Grattan returned a minute later. “That was Ellie. She just had a call from Iseult. Iseult felt something and she’s on her way to the hospital.”

  ~

  The brothers rode up Peel Street in a taxi. Joe felt unwell. Maybe it was the salmon. Maybe it was anxiety over this pregnancy, a weight he had been carrying in his gut all month and trying to ignore.

  The day had grown colder, the streets festooned with white smoke and steam. The cab passed between a pair of gates and ran up a carriage road to deliver them at the front door of the hospital’s Ross Pavilion.

  Joe reached into his pocket for money to pay the fare, but Grattan said, “I’ll take care of it, brother. You go on. I’ll find you inside.”

  The door was held open by a gaunt young commissionaire, a veteran with campaign ribbons on his chest and a scarlet cellophane poppy on his lapel. Taking the elevator to the third floor, Joe hurried to the nursing station, the soles of his English shoes cracking crisply on the linoleum. A little red-headed nurse in starched cap and pinafore led him down the polished corridor and opened a door.

  Iseult was barefoot on the floor at the foot of her bed, gripping the white iron bedstead with both hands. Her legs were spread apart, her head was lowered between outstretched arms, her flannel nightgown ballooned over her swollen body, and she was grunting rhythmically.

  “Jesus, let’s get a doctor in here,” Joe said to the little nurse, who disappeared.

  Pain, hot breath, and a smell of shit clouded the room, and for a moment he thought of Mick Heaney sprawled on his back on the frozen dirt in the shed. Weak wintry light smeared the room. Curtains halfway open revealed a pano-rama of grey city and black river. Iseult’s face was pale, damp. He pulled off his gloves, dropped them on the bed, then rubbed his hands briskly to warm them and began massaging the small of her back and her hips. Gently at first, then with more firmness.

  She stretched, arching like a cat. “We’re going to be fine,” she told him.

  “I know that.”

  “Has Grattan turned up?”

  “Yes.”

  “He’s all right?”

  “Yes.”

  Grattan and Elise must have run into each other in the lobby, for they entered the room together, followed by a baby-faced doctor and a senior nurse who glared at Joe.

  “Good afternoon, Mr. O’Brien,” the doctor said. “Quite a crowd.”

  “Good afternoon.”

  Joe could feel the senior nurse bristling. She clearly wished to order him from his wife’s room, but something in his stance must have warned her it would not be wise. She turned and followed the doctor to Iseult’s bedside and briskly drew the curtains around the bed.

  While they examined her, Joe stood by the window, hands clasped behind his back. The light over the city was grey and white. The river would freeze soon. In a few more weeks the ice would be thick enough to drive trucks and wagons across.

  Fear as much as ambition or intelligence had brought him this far. One slip, one moment of weakness, and the river current would have him.

  Elise touched his arm. “Thanks for going to look for Grattan. You’re a good brother, Joe.”

  He nodded. Those closest to him knew him the least.

  The curtains around the bed were swept back. The senior nurse glared at him and he glared back at her. He wasn’t ready to leave Iseult to the care of the medical profession, not just yet.

  The door opened and the little red-headed nurse wheeled in a tea trolley.

  “Everything’s quite normal, Mr. O’Brien,” the young doctor said. “Enjoy your tea but don’t stay too long. Our patient needs her rest.”

  The doctor and nurses left the room. Elise plumped Iseult’s pillows and smoothed the covers, then kicked off her shoes and hopped up on the bed, where she sat cross-legged and started pouring tea. Everyone except Iseult took a cup with sugar and milk, buttered toast, raspberry jam, shortbread.

  Iseult was silent, absorbed in her body’s mysterious processes.

  Elise was silent too, probably wondering what crazy scheme Grattan might get involved in next. And Grattan was probably planning his next escapade.

  Clink of china, greasy scent of butter, smell of heat glowing off the iron radiators.

  The doctor had seemed terribly young, but Joe knew Iseult trusted him. She had asked him to lend a few hours of his time to her clinic. Within her body, protected by her tissue, muscle, blood, their third — fourth — child waited to be born.

  Slipping off the bed, Elise crossed the room, her stocking feet making a brushing noise on the linoleum. She switched on the electric light, then went to the window and drew the curtains shut. Returning to the bedside, she murmured something to Iseult that Joe didn’t catch, then started massaging Iseult’s swollen belly and singing what sounded like a lullaby, or a love song, in a language Joe did not understand, possibly Yiddish. It sounded right, anyhow, like sweet air in the room, like warmth, like safety.

  No point in thinking how vulnerable they really were, how exposed.

  PROVINCE OF QUEBEC, 1929

  On the Run

  “I believe he’s in detroit,” his mother said.

  The O’Brien Capital Construction Co. Ltd. was building a bridge from Detroit to Windsor. In Detroit Mike’s father usually stayed at the Book Cadillac Hotel; he would bring home bars of soap in the shape of books for Frankie, Mike’s younger sister. But Mike had also overheard his mother telling Aunt Elise that his father could be in New York, and by then — Mike was nearly fifteen — he had a pretty good idea what New York was all about.

  Later that evening he was in his room doing a delicate bit of soldering on his radio set when his mother entered without knocking.

  “That radio’s taking too much time from your schoolwork!”

  He reminded her that the science master at Lower Canada College had encouraged the boys to build sets, even helping them order parts. The radio wasn’t taking time from his schoolwork; it was schoolwork.

  “Do not speak to me like that, Michael!”

  “Like what?”

  “As if you know everything and I don’t know anything! Don’t use that tone of voice.”

  “What tone of voice?”

  “Oh, stop it.” She sat down suddenly on his bed. “Oh, stop it, myself. The smell of that awful gunk has gotten to my head. I can’t think straight.”

  “Solder doesn’t smell any worse than your fixer.”

  “I suppose it doesn’t.” Flopping backwards, she lay staring up at the ceiling.

  At least she wasn’t holding a camera. She sometimes came into his room and snapped photos of him doing homework or working on his radio or assembling a model plane. Other parents brought out the camera to record birthday parties or Christmases, but she had always taken pictures of them doing ordinary things. Homework. Eating breakfast. Riding their bikes. Mike and his sisters were so accustomed to it they hardly noticed. Their father filed all her photographs in albums. He used to keep the albums in his office downtown but he had brought them home. Now they were in a special bookcase in his study. Mike and his sisters were allowed to take them out and look through them, but they never did.

  He suddenly felt sorry for his mother.

  “I’ll open my window and leave the door ajar. The draft’ll suck out the fumes.”

  She got up, came over to where he was sitting, and rubbed his hair. “Don’t stay up too late.”

  After she left he went back to soldering, most of his consciousness concentrated in his fingers. He was surprised when the notion of leaving home — of running away — came to him all of a sudden, like a
flashbulb popping. It wasn’t a plan he had been cooking up; it wasn’t really even a plan. All of a sudden he just saw himself walking down the Westmount hillside, headed for the train yards.

  His parents had been at odds with each other lately, never raising their voices but mostly keeping to separate parts of the house. His sisters had their own lives, their school friends. He’d slip away and they’d hardly notice. He’d be leaving his radio set behind, but he’d come back sooner or later, or maybe he’d build another.

  He told himself he’d rather be heating a can of beans over a hobo fire in the Alberta badlands than spending another day on Skye Avenue in Westmount. He’d been born out west; he and Margo were the only real Westerners in the family. Maybe what he felt was a homing instinct, like geese winging north in spring.

  ~

  He had trouble sleeping that night. Anxiety seemed to exist on its own, like a powerful radio signal, especially when he lay in bed. He had never tried describing the feeling to anyone. It didn’t seem to fit into words. It didn’t have a cause or a reason that he could put his finger on. Even giving the hum of feelings a name — anxiety — had been fairly recent. It had always been the way things inside him were, his tuning for “normal.”

  Once he left home, he told himself, he’d be too busy looking out for himself to worry. He liked horses, and maybe out in Alberta he’d become a cowboy and there wouldn’t be any time to lie in bed feeling anxious about things he couldn’t name.

  ~

  The next day, Saturday, his mother was meeting Aunt Elise for lunch, then going to the art museum. Margo was spending the weekend at her pal Lulu Taschereau’s and Frankie was at a birthday party on Roslyn Avenue. The maids and the cook always took long naps on Saturday afternoon.

  He packed bread, cheese, and apples in an old Royal Flying Corps haversack that his uncle had given him for a get-well present when he was recuperating from pneumonia. Uncle Grattan had recently quit selling real estate and bought an old farm in the Laurentians, which he planned to turn into a ski lodge. Mike’s father had called it another hare-brained scheme and said Grattan needed to grow up and probably never would, but Mike had been with his uncle when strangers came up to him in the street wanting to shake hands with him. Sometimes they even saluted. A stranger had come up to Grattan one Saturday morning in the hardware store on Sherbrooke Street, said something Mike didn’t catch, then laid his head on Grattan’s shoulder and started crying. Everyone in the store was staring, but Grattan had put his arms around the man as if he were a kid who’d fallen off his bike and needed comforting. Afterwards Mike asked who he was.