The O'Briens

by Peter Behrens

  “M’sieu et dame?” A waiter in a short red jacket was poised to take their order.

  She asked for a cup of lobster bisque and a Waldorf salad. Her arms were bare and still tanned from the beach. Johnny wore a striped shirt and a silk foulard tie, silk the colour of dried blood.

  When they did speak, she usually found herself telling Johnny Taschereau things about herself and her family she never spoke of to anyone else, even to Johnny’s sister Lulu, her best friend since boarding school. There was something fresh, strong, and unusual about Johnny’s willingness to listen, and it had become a kind of drug, their intimacy.

  The waiter went away and Margo took another sip of her drink, barely wetting her lips. The complex flavour of chilled liquor always made her aware of the past, reminding her that everything she’d ever experienced — a wild accumulation — had brought her to precisely this moment.

  “So now, my dear,” Johnny said, “we must talk of the war coming.”

  “Daddy hates the war.”

  “It has put him back in business, though.”

  “That’s all for Mike’s sake. Daddy thinks if they have a lot of war work, Mike won’t be in such a hurry to go overseas. The government might not let him go.”

  Her father had shut the firm during the Depression, but after the storm troopers marched into Prague he had leased offices in the Sun Life Building and begun hiring engineers and office staff. Mike, with his McGill engineering degree, had returned from California, and their father made him project manager on a million-dollar contract to rebuild an old military airfield across the river, promoting him over lots of men with more experience.

  She touched Johnny’s hand. “I wish I could have one more week in Maine. Could you get away? It wouldn’t have to be for long, Johnny.”

  “That’s certainly something to think about.”

  “Just the two of us, alone at the beach.”

  “I’m afraid the call-up may happen anytime.”

  “Are you my hostage to fortune?”

  He smiled and shrugged.

  She caught a glimpse of Uncle Grattan in his air force uniform, out in the lobby. Was he coming into the bar? But Grattan — if it was Grattan — passed out of sight, probably headed for the restaurant, a more popular spot for lunch.

  After selling his ski resort to American investors, her uncle had started writing about military matters and foreign affairs in the Montreal Herald. Grattan had made three trips to Germany since Hitler came to power; he wrote that the Germans were in love with the Dark Ages. After Prague his column had been syndicated, and now it appeared in newspapers across the Dominion, in Australia, and occasionally in the London Evening Standard.

  Grattan had recently gotten himself elected mayor of Westmount, the first Roman Catholic to hold the office. It was a position with little power, according to Margo’s father. An enclave surrounded by the city of Montreal, Westmount was run by a professional city manager, responsible to aldermen who happened to be some of the top businessmen in the country. Even with his gold chain of office and the official iron lamp posts planted outside his row house on Carthage Avenue, Grattan wasn’t much more than a figure-head, her father said. “What does it pay? Five hundred a year? We pay the dogcatcher more.”

  During the royal visit earlier that summer, Grattan, in silk hat and striped pants, medals glittering, had greeted the King and Queen at Westmount City Hall, chatting with them in the royal Cadillac all the way up to Murray Park — renamed King George Park in the monarch’s honour. In his tongue-tied address that afternoon, the little king even claimed to remember the ceremony at Buckingham Palace in 1918 when his father pinned the DSO on Captain Grattan O’Brien of the Royal Flying Corps.

  In Murray Park that afternoon Grattan had delivered a speech criticizing the Dominion’s unpreparedness for war. That was, Margo’s father admitted, the truth so far as it went — the country wasn’t at all prepared. But he still hated watching his brother performing like a dressed-up donkey for a bunch of bloodthirsty Englishmen. “Didn’t you get enough war the last time?” he’d shouted at Grattan on Sunday, when England had already declared war and Canada was about to.

  Now, in the Mount Royal bar, Johnny was saying, “I can’t leave town the way things are. But maybe after a few weeks, if we’re still here.”

  She had slipped the room key from his jacket pocket before the drinks were served. They had a well-established routine for their hotel rendezvous. She had furtiveness — and hotel rooms — in common with her father, if nothing else.

  Why did she feel so close to Johnny? He was the only man she’d ever slept with. He had a gift for pleasure. He was good at making her feel good. And her body exercised some considerable power over his. Had her mother ever felt that way about her father? Had their bodies engaged in acts of love like a struggle, almost like fighting? In bed with Johnny Taschereau was the only time she felt complete.

  They’d never discussed their relationship. Had either of them ever used the word love, in French or in English? He certainly had not. Nonetheless she was convinced that love composed the current between them. Being in love made silences intimate and magical. Being in love made her feelings almost unbearable during the lonely, powerful moments in hotel rooms and tourist cabins after he had fallen asleep. After sex he was like a dead bird, warm, glittering, but she always felt supercharged with awareness. These were the moments when she believed she was going to marry him. Otherwise, in the world outside hotel rooms, the prospect seemed less credible: frayed, a bit hopeless.

  Johnny Taschereau and her father got on well. Of all the young men she had brought home he was the only one Joe had ever invited into his study.

  “What do you two have to talk about?” she’d asked Johnny.

  “You,” Johnny replied. “And we have other interests in common. The stock market. Men in government. Your father doesn’t have a lot to say, but what he says is usually quite perceptive.”

  Johnny was less vulnerable than her father, more supple, more cynical, more at home in the world. It was hard to imagine Johnny fleeing to Manhattan on a night train. Hard to imagine any predicament he could not face up to directly, any emotion or feeling he would not be able to articulate instantly, with wry style and pungent irony. Johnny Taschereau was built to last.

  If war came, how was she to get through the days without him? Love had awakened a terrible sense of incompleteness.

  ~

  Her parents had sold the house at Butterfly Beach in 1932 and built a cottage at Kennebunk, Maine. Every summer they went cruising in Penobscot Bay for two or three weeks in their old Friendship sloop, just the two of them, no children invited.

  Three weeks after the jackboots stomped into Prague, there had been a telephone call from an assistant manager at the Pierre. Mr O’Brien was ill; would a member of the family please come and fetch him?

  As far as she knew it was the first time since California he’d gone on a squawk. She’d gone to New York with her mother to fetch him. They found him in his tower suite at the Pierre, with the windows open and gusts of wind blowing curtains and fluttering hotel stationery off the writing desk.

  The male nurse had already cleaned him up and gotten him dressed. While Iseult lay down for a nap, Margo took her father to the hotel barbershop for a shave and a haircut, then to a coffee shop on Madison Avenue, where he swallowed orange juice and dishwater coffee and didn’t touch his scrambled eggs, even after she asked the surly waiter to bring him Worcestershire sauce.

  On the train back to Montreal, while her father snored in the lounge car and the train ran past congeries of factories around Poughkeepsie, she and her mother sat in the dining car spooning tomato soup, and her mother talked about their trip from Santa Barbara up to the Selkirks in 1931. She called it a pilgrimage. By going all that way, she said, they reminded themselves of what they had to hold on to, and it saved their marriage. It made a nice story, Margo had thought to herself, but did her mother really believe it? Especially sin
ce the other pilgrim was at that moment in a lounge chair two cars back, shined up and shaved but with a hell of a hangover.

  There were only a few men her father’s age in the bar of the Mount Royal, two of them in uniform. “Captains,” Johnny said, glancing in their direction. “Lots of fifty-year-old captains left over from the last war. They’ll all have to be weeded out.”

  After coffee, they mimed saying goodbye. Johnny stood up and they kissed politely, both cheeks. She left him standing in the bar. As she crossed the lobby, a herd of American businessmen just off the airport bus was milling at the front desk. People in armchairs were reading day-old London newspapers printed on airmail paper as thin as tissue.

  Sometimes it was important not to think too much about what you were doing but just to do it. The room was on the seventh floor, and she didn’t want to be seen waiting at the lobby elevator. Passing the newsstand, she continued down a corridor lined with shops, a florist, the hotel barbershop, a fur salon. Sexual hunger — really more like thirst — was impossible to disconnect from a mood of furtiveness. That was certainly part of its pleasure.

  A pair of steel doors opened to a service stairwell, brightly lit, painted white, unused. She went up two flights quickly, heels tapping on painted concrete steps, then pushed on another heavy door and stepped out into a carpeted hallway lined with room doors, numbered and painted glossy black. She found the elevator and pressed the button. Waiting, she considered herself in a mirror. The summer frock was all wrong — girlish, not chic. She’d ordered it in the spring, before things got serious with Johnny, before she had come into herself. The black straw hat was more her style now. She still had her glow of tan from the beach. Long waist, long legs. She sometimes worried she was too thin, her breasts too small. Cameras liked her shoulders and the bones in her face. Aunt Elise had photographed her for a story the Star Weekly was running on Montreal’s nightlife. Elise liked the photograph and wanted to include it in her new brochure, calling it “A Montreal Fiancée.”

  “But that’s not fair. I’m not engaged, Elise. He hasn’t said a single word about getting married.”

  “Look at you. You’re the girl everyone wants to marry.”

  “Not him,” she had murmured.

  Would they be spending the afternoon in bed together or must he return to the office? The Taschereaus had been lawyers for generations, and Sir Louis-Philippe would have been angry and hurt if his only son had refused to join the firm. Johnny never complained, but she knew he found the work dull.

  She wore her hat tipped low, a woman with something to conceal, a provocative mess of feelings, like a suitcase full of dirty clothes. Rancid and brutal and plaintive with desire. So this was what people called love. Literally it caused a weakness in the knees. Or maybe that was just two manhattans at lunch and her high-heeled dash up the service stairway.

  She watched the elevator arrow move languidly around the dial. If she’d waited down in the lobby she felt certain she would have encountered her father. What would he have done? What would he say?

  “He’ll make a good husband if he doesn’t get himself killed,” he’d said, when Johnny had turned up at Skye Avenue in uniform after a church parade.

  If she lost Johnny to the war would she tighten up, curl up into herself, like a shrimp dropped into a glass of gin? Or would she need to keep on living this way — sexually, wantonly — with some other man? She did not know. Here was life, her real life. Scars were being applied; she could feel them going in.

  The elevator arrived, settled, doors punched open. It was packed with bellboys, luggage, and grey-flannelled American businessmen. What she wanted, what she needed — she’d have to work it all out later; there wasn’t time now.

  “Room for one more?” She smiled at the elevator operator.

  “Bien sûr, mademoiselle.”

  ~

  A couple of hours later she awoke in the mussed bed and heard Johnny speaking into the phone. The room was dark except for a crack of light a couple of inches wide where the drapes did not come together perfectly. There was enough light to see him sitting in the chair at the little writing desk, holding the telephone to his ear. He was naked.

  “Oui, oui, je comprends.”

  She felt ragged, sore. Hotel-room dreams were so steep and so heavy, though she was already losing the sense of this one. She struggled to remember if there was anywhere else she was supposed to be.

  “Tiens. À bientôt.”

  Johnny replaced the phone receiver. He had a beautiful neck and shoulders.

  “Who was it?” she asked, her voice sounding furry.

  He looked around. His blunt face was very French. So was the dark brown hair he wore rather long.

  “Well, I decided to call Rainville, our adjutant. I thought if anyone knew what was up, he would.”

  Naked in bed at the Mount Royal Hotel, Peel Street, Montreal, province of Quebec, in the Dominion of Canada, coloured red on the globe, part of the British Empire and committed to joining England in war.

  “Lucky I checked in. He’s just received mobilization orders in a telegram delivered to his office. He’s a publisher, you know. He’s in a bit of a flurry. Very annoyed the orders were in English. Mon dieu, you are a lovely woman.”

  “What does it mean?”

  “Well, my platoon is to mount a guard at Victoria Pier tonight. I don’t know what after that. It’s going to be a hell of a job rounding men up. Not many have telephones. I need to go home first and get into uniform. Can you drive me?”

  “Reviens au lit, Johnny.”

  He smiled and came back and lay beside her. She rested her head on his shoulder and they were quiet for a while. Hotel rooms were so sombre and thick in the middle of the afternoon. She could smell the scented soap in the bathroom. His skin felt warm.

  She sensed the excitement he was trying to conceal because it had nothing to do with her and he didn’t want to hurt her feelings. He was impatient to get up, dress, head out into the next chapter of his life, but he also had very good manners.

  A kind of remove had already occurred. Taking one of his well-shaped, masculine hands, she began kissing the fingertips.

  “Jolie,” he said.

  She could see everything. The war unrolling like a hotel-room carpet, heavy and dark, smelling of moth powder and stealing the light. She had wanted this war, as most of her friends had, more from boredom than anything else.

  “If you’ll drive me around the East End I can try to track down my men. Perhaps it will all blow over. But those are my orders.”

  All the intimacy left the room when he spoke English. It was suddenly as though he had another woman somewhere, as if he suddenly had a wife. The pain of the situation stimulated her in a deep way. “Come into me, Johnny, just come into me.”

  He was hard very quickly and touching her and she was open. Then he was inside her, rocking them both, her legs locked around his hips. The encounter had a bolting, panicked quality. They were digging something deep and nervous out of each other. It was like driving very fast because they had to, because even Johnny Taschereau was scared of something. The sense of dangerously high speed, at the very limit of control. She couldn’t know for certain everything he was feeling, but underneath his excitement, the fear was there.

  He came into her powerfully and she held onto his shoulders, then let herself go, riding the panic, shuddering, shaking tears out of her eyes, tasting her own breath.

  She wasn’t wearing her diaphragm; he must have noticed but hadn’t said anything.

  He stayed on her another minute, neither of them saying a word. She could feel his heart. Then he kissed her, got up, and went into the bathroom. A moment later she heard the shower running. A phase of their courtship was over: something new and even more dangerous had begun.

  ~

  A hotel garage man brought around the cream convertible and she picked up Johnny on the corner of Mansfield and Sherbrooke, two blocks from the Mount Royal. She seemed to have an instin
ct for subterfuge, for concealment and deception. She disliked wearing the phony ring but she had been rather good, on the whole, at sneaking around. It was another aspect of the intimacy they shared.

  They drove into Westmount. Heading up Murray Hill, they passed Skye Avenue and she glanced at the house. There was no one home except the cook and the maids; her parents were always busy, and even Frankie was doing volunteer work at the clinic and hoping for a war job. Mike was across the river seven days a week building his airfield. He had been seeing a lot of her old convent pal Mary Cohen, who was back in Montreal after several years in Europe — Margo had seen them together at the Normandie Roof and Mother Martin’s. People said Buck Cohen had gone to Europe after New York gangsters tried to murder him; he’d died of a heart attack on the Côte d’Azur. Mary and her Irish mother now lived on Carthage Avenue. Mary was a secretary at a Jewish law firm in the Sun Life Building.

  Mike had his OTC commission in the Royal Montreal Regiment, another militia outfit, and Margo knew boys in the RMR who were expecting to be shipped overseas any day. But the Ministry of Munitions and Supply had classified Mike’s work as “vital to the Imperial war effort,” so he would not be summoned to active duty. She was a little surprised he had gone along with it, but building airfields was probably more important than drilling recruits in Westmount Park, and her brother had never shown much interest in soldiering.

  No one was home at the Taschereaus’ either, except the cook, who was asleep, and the elderly maid, Albertine. While Johnny went upstairs to change, she stiffly steered Margo into the drawing room and asked if she wanted tea.

  “Non, merci.”

  Margo knew Albertine was a distant relation of the family and came from Arthabaska County, where the Taschereaus still owned farms. She’d been Johnny’s nurse until a Scottish woman replaced her. After twenty-five years in Westmount and as many summers in Maine, Albertine still would not speak English. She attended Mass at Saint-Léon-de-Westmount four or five times a week, sitting in one of the Taschereau family pews.