The O'Briens

by Peter Behrens

  Margo crossed the room, feeling the kinswoman’s dark, shiny little eyes watching her, and stood self-consciously before the window. She could see a bit of the playing field in Murray Park — no one ever called it King George Park. The tennis courts had been deserted lately. Was it the news from Europe that kept people from playing games? Maybe it was just summer closing down. She didn’t want to let go of summer, not yet.

  But layers of cloud were moving in over the park, where a couple of boys were tossing a football back and forth — another sign of autumn. The day was losing its abundant light. The sky was shades of grey now, with black thunderheads. It looked like rain. Maybe an electrical storm.

  Johnny had never taken his part-time soldiering very seriously. He insisted that his CO, Colonel Rivard, though he hated les boches, would rather be fighting the English in Ontario. Most of the Maisies’ energies were focused on hockey and softball games. The junior officers were OTC from Laval University, except for a few Loyola men like Johnny. The captains and majors were all trench veterans, average age forty-six.

  Johnny was still upstairs. Margo couldn’t hear him. If it weren’t for Albertine watching her with beady eyes, she’d go upstairs herself. She’d love to see his bedroom.

  At Kennebunk Beach most of the cottages would be shut for the season, boards nailed up over any windows facing the sea. There was always a big September storm, with wild green waves and buckets of warm rain. But Kennebunk was three hundred miles away, and people said if the war lasted there would be rationing of gasoline and tires. It was already getting difficult to exchange Canadian money for American. She wondered when she would see the ocean again.

  She had always admired the Taschereaus’ drawing room. The sleek furniture was more modern than anything she was used to. She liked the pale grey rug and the Japanese lamps. Mme Taschereau was from a Philadelphia family and collected art by Canadian painters. Landscapes of the northern wilderness, pays sauvage, were hung on the walls along with more abstract works by the same Montreal painters Margo’s mother admired: Borduas, Alexander Bercovitch, Jack Humphrey.

  Conscious of Albertine still watching, Margo went to the grand piano, where Aunt Elise’s portrait of Johnny, taken before he left for his European year, stood in a silver frame. Johnny at twenty-one didn’t look particularly happy, but not sad either. Elise had located a wariness in him that most people never noticed, since it was camouflaged so well by his bon vivant style. She had chosen to photograph Johnny outside, en plein air, unusual for her. Johnny told her they’d walked all around downtown before Elise chose a spot in front of an old maple tree at the top of Peel Street, on the edge of Mount Royal Park.

  “What did you talk about while you were walking around?”

  “The light.”

  “Did she talk about our family?”

  “Not really.”

  “People used to say Uncle Grattan was crazy.”

  “Well, they don’t anymore.”

  In the photograph Johnny’s hair was rough and windblown and he seemed to be looking at something far away. The war, Margo thought. Was it the war he saw coming?

  But the picture had been taken in 1935 or ’36. No one had been thinking about a war in those days. He could have been looking at a squirrel, or a bus wheezing along Pine Avenue. Elise had taken him up there for the raised light. Margo had worked with enough photographers to know they would go anywhere for the right sort of light.

  “Alors.”

  She looked around. Albertine had disappeared and Johnny stood in the doorway in his new khaki battledress, haversack slung over his shoulder.

  “On y va.”

  She watched him scribble a note to his parents. He went out to the kitchen and she heard him saying goodbye to the cook and Albertine, who came out with him, held open the front door, and stood watching them walk out to the car. Johnny turned and waved, but the little woman in the black dress and starched maid’s apron stayed perfectly still in the doorway, like a French-Canadian folk sculpture crudely carved in pine.

  The first of his goodbyes. The thought struck her like a blow on the cheek, and it was all she could do to keep walking, heels click-clacking on the slate path. If he hadn’t had such a steely, military grip on her arm she would have fallen down on the grass on hands and knees and wept and spat and howled.

  ~

  It started to rain as they were driving over the mountain. Johnny had the address of every man in his platoon listed in a black notebook. Only four had telephone numbers, and the adjutant would be trying to reach them. Johnny was supposed to collect as many of the others as he could find and report to the Craig Street Armoury by eight p.m.

  The rain came on sweeps of warm wind. The road over the mountain was already littered with branches and green leaves, and they passed a dozen cars pulled over on the shoulder. The windshield was foggy and the wipers weren’t much good on the uphill. As she drove over the crest, Margo could feel the car being pushed and swayed by the wind. Rain drummed the canvas roof. Johnny reached across to wipe the glass with his handkerchief but it was still difficult to see out the windshield. Shifting down to second, she switched on her headlights. It was like driving through a violent cloud, but on the downhill grade at least the wipers were going a little faster.

  Johnny lit a cigarette and handed it to her. They had fallen into another of their silences.

  Back in August, when everyone else had returned to Montreal, Margo and Frankie had stayed on alone at the O’Brien summer cottage, and Johnny at the Taschereaus’. They’d made plans to leave together, but at the last minute Frankie received an invitation to stay with friends at Ogunquit, so Margo and Johnny were able to set off for home alone. Their families were not expecting them. They stopped at a tourist court at Franconia, bought groceries and beer at a country store, built a fire in their cabin, and spent the night together. The next morning, driving down into the St. Lawrence Valley past lush meadows of sweet-smelling hay, Margo had felt clean, powerful, safe.

  Johnny now switched on the news in French. The Poles were pleading with London and Paris to send troops. Hurricane winds had derailed a train north of Boston, and Montreal could expect the same storm, which had started in the Caribbean. A boy and girl playing on the street in St. Henry had been electrocuted by a downed power line. The radio announcer did not mention any troop mobilizations.

  “We’re a military secret,” Johnny remarked. “Nobody knows about us — not even us. Germany, beware.”

  She was steering down Mount Royal Boulevard into the heart of the French-speaking city. Johnny studied his list.

  “Gingras, Jean-Louis, Private. 3412 Boulevard Saint-Joseph. Let’s take a right here. Go to Boulevard Saint-Joseph, then take a left.”

  Rain thrummed on the roof. The storm was a harbinger. Summer was being lost, and her world was changing fast.

  They found Private Gingras sitting on the balcony of his family’s third-floor flat, watching the downpour. Johnny called up to him from the sidewalk and the boy hurried inside to change into uniform. While Margo waited behind the wheel, Johnny rang two more doorbells on the same block. One of the soldiers, a corporal, was at work at the big bakery on Marie-Anne Street, but the other was at home, and he came out wearing battledress and climbed into the back seat alongside Private Gingras. With the two young soldiers aboard, they headed for the bakery, where Johnny located his corporal, told him to go home and get into uniform, and gave him money to take a streetcar to Craig Street. They gathered the rest of the platoon from flats and tenements on a dozen streets east of Boulevard Saint-Denis. The district was unfamiliar to Margo; it seemed buttoned up, grey. There were hardly any shops. Johnny kept flagging down taxis, filling them with young soldiers, then dispatching the taxis to the armoury. The streets were empty of people, probably on account of the violence of the storm, and few cars were on the road. They kept passing by enormous grey stone parish churches.

  After two hours Johnny had filled three more taxis and dispatched them to Cr
aig Street, and four young men in battledress were sitting practically on top of one another in the back seat of Margo’s car. They sounded excited and happy. It was dark. Rain was still crashing down, and Johnny kept leaning forward to wipe the steamy windshield.

  As she steered along Park Avenue Margo saw a streetcar stalled on its track in the middle of the road. The road was flooded and the streetcar was shorting out, white bolts of electricity lashing from its cable and connector. Something about it terrified her. She wanted to pull over, jump out of the car, start running. She dabbed the brake pedal, but then a cold calm came over her, numbing, maybe instinctive, as though she were a bird in a great migrating flock, about to give herself up to an almost endless journey. Her grip tightened on the wheel. Instead of braking she punched the accelerator and swerved neatly around the streetcar and its fiery connection, her tires slashing through the black water.

  Johnny, holding a flashlight and studying his black book, hardly noticed. He had been checking names off the list, and now he resumed giving her extraordinarily precise directions, guiding them from street to street, tenement to tenement. Margo tried to let go of everything else — every speck of self-pity, of terror — and just follow the directions and keep going.

  MONTREAL, OCTOBER 1939

  Violence

  Monday was frankie’s day off so she headed downtown to shop for shoes. People said there were bound to be all sorts of shortages coming, and good shoes were one thing she could not imagine doing without.

  She and Margo rode the streetcar together as far as Phillips Square. Margo was going to Craig Street to see Johnny Taschereau and discuss their wedding plans, which were being slapped together in hurry, since his regiment expected to receive overseas orders any day.

  Frankie knew how trivial, how frivolous her own mission was. She had seen boys drilling in Westmount Park and watched the newsreels from Poland showing refugee children and white horses dead on the road, machine-gunned by Nazi planes. And her sister was marrying a man who might very soon to be sent into battle. But no new shoes for the duration — how terrible, how strange.

  There was nothing interesting in any of the department stores, but as she walked into Holt Renfrew she suddenly knew she would find exactly what she wanted there. She rode the elevator up to the third floor, got out, and immediately saw a gorgeous pair of Italian pumps. Pale yellow. Kid lining. Her size exactly.

  It had happened before, often, knowing what was going to happen just before it did. It was why she loved playing cards, and why people were always telling her she was lucky. Of course, yellow was a summer colour and summer was long gone, but she could wear the shoes on warm days and they would be nice to have for spring. The toes pinched a little but the leather would stretch.

  She came out of Holt’s carrying her new shoes in a shopping bag, feeling gifted and lucky. The October morning was fine, stuffed with light, and she didn’t feel like going inside again now that she’d accomplished her mission. It had been sultry for weeks, the city stinking of gunpowder, it had seemed to her, though she knew it wasn’t that, not really. Now the atmosphere was clear; the strongest scent was autumn leaves and earth.

  She wondered if Margo might be willing to drive down to Maine with her for one last holiday. October light was gorgeous at the beach and they could have a nice time at the cottage, just the two of them. She could probably wangle a few days off from the clinic on Notre-Dame Street where she was volunteering four days a week — when the war started it hadn’t felt right not to have some job. Her mother wanted her to go off to college the way American girls did, but after eleven years at the convent she wasn’t interested in more studying.

  She’d have preferred modelling clothes at Holt’s to handing out vitamins and delousing little boys, but her mother had insisted she go down to the slums and do something useful. She didn’t know how useful she was, but some of the medical students at the clinic were charming. Others seemed to despise her but she believed she’d win them over eventually. She wouldn’t wear her new shoes to work, though. Yellow pumps, however comely, were not going to win the hearts of Catholic socialists.

  As she strolled along Sherbrooke Street then turned down Peel, the only signs of the war were bold black headlines slathered across the newsstands. She decided she would stop by the Sun Life Building to pick up her tennis racquet, which her father had had restrung at a sports store on St. Catherine Street. When the war started, no one played tennis for a couple of weeks, but it was too sweet a pleasure to give up for the duration. There were still two or three weeks of playable weather left and she liked how she looked in a tennis dress. There was even the possibility of a match that afternoon, with a twenty-one-year-old captain in the RMR, if he could swing a couple of hours’ leave. Meanwhile, her brother might be persuaded to take her out to lunch.

  A shiny green army truck with an artillery piece in tow was parked on Mansfield Street. She read the hand-painted sign attached to the truck:

  5th (Westmount) Field Battery

  Royal Canadian Artillery

  RECRUITS WANTED

  Radio operators — Mechanics — Surveyors

  Apply this truck or the Craig St. Drill Hall

  One of the recruiting sergeants was speaking earnestly to a telegraph boy astride a bicycle. Another soldier, leaning on the truck, was picking his teeth when he noticed Frankie and winked at her. She tried not to smile as she ran up the granite steps, entered through bronze doors, and crossed the lobby towards the elevator bank.

  The moment she stepped out on the twenty-second floor she heard her father yelling. The people she passed in the hallway ignored her or smiled quickly, keeping their heads down, bombarded by the angry noises from his corner office. She started wishing she’d made other plans for lunch, but she couldn’t retreat now and leave them thinking she was scared of her papa, even at his most ogreish.

  “What’s going on?” she asked the pert little receptionist. “Has the sky fallen?”

  “M’sieu Mike is with your papa.” The girl was afraid to say more.

  Clutching her purse and Holt’s shopping bag, Frankie went up to his door and rapped sharply — shave-and-a-haircut, two-bits. He’d taught her that knock when she was little, and she always used it with him: their private signal. “Blessed Frankie of the Knock,” Mike used to call her.

  “Not now!” her father shouted.

  But she was already opening the door. “Only me,” she said, slipping inside and shutting it softly behind her.

  Mike was leaning on a corner of their father’s desk, lighting a cigarette from a silver lighter shaped like a pineapple. Their father paced in front of windows that looked across the city and the St. Lawrence River to the purple mountains of New York State on the horizon. The windows on the other side of the room overlooked Dominion Square, with its trees and flowerbeds and ugly statues.

  “Mike, how about taking me to lunch?”

  Mike smiled at her. Their father drew on his cigarette and looked at her through narrowed eyes. All summer he’d been distracted and in a foul mood. In July he had left their cook behind at a filling station in the White Mountains when she had gone to use the bathroom. Listening to the news from Europe on his car radio, he’d forgotten all about the poor woman and driven away.

  Frankie watched him place his smouldering cigarette on the edge of his desk, which was already scored with burn marks, and pick up a hardcover notebook, something like a ledger.

  “Most of the estimates for the new airport job are in there,” Mike said. “Wing Commander Blades says the field at St. Hubert, no matter how we stretch it, is never going to be big enough to handle the new bombers, so they’re going to want a brand-new field somewhere else, probably Dorval. The squeeze is on with materials and labour and everything’s up fifteen percent in the past two weeks, so you’ll have to keep an eye on prices. But Blades says the main thing is to bid low enough to be sure you’re in, even if it looks like losing money at first. They’re going to be building a lot m
ore big fields after that one. Gander’s really going to get the build-up, maybe the Azores, and they are planning a bunch of new fields out on the prairies to train aircrew from all over.”

  “Your numbers don’t add up,” their father said. “I’d lose my fucking shirt.” He started ripping out a page from the notebook, so slowly Frankie could hear every inch of the tear. Mike stared as their father slowly crumpled the page in his fist, then started tearing out more pages, crumpling them, dropping them on the floor. Finally he dumped the entire book into the wastebasket, sat down in his desk chair, and started spinning around slowly, like a little kid, the tips of his handmade shoes hardly touching the carpet. He dressed well, but next to Mike he’d always look like a tree stump in an expensive suit. The only noise was the squeak squeak squeak from the chair.

  “Mike,” Frankie said. “Lunch?”

  “Yeah, sure.” Mike was gazing at their father as if he could not believe how the old man was behaving.

  “Where’ll we go?”

  “I have a lunch date with Mary Cohen but you’re welcome to come along.”

  “Okay.”

  “Aerodromes, weather stations, aircraft plants — it’ll be an air war, Dad,” Mike said. “Somebody’s going to get their foot in that door. Might as well be us.”

  “What the fuck do you mean ‘us’?”

  Mike shrugged. “I’m sorry.”

  Their father stopped spinning and reached for another cigarette.

  “Going to grab my hat, Frankie,” Mike told her. “Meet you by the elevators.”

  “Okey-doke.”

  Mike left the room without shutting the door. Their father lit his cigarette, then slowly spun in his chair.

  They’d always gotten along, Frankie and her father. Most of the time she was able to feel what he was feeling. They were both Black Irish, with the same dark hair and blue eyes. She knew him, Frankie thought, the way she knew herself.

  He stopped spinning. “Know what?” he said softly.