The O'Briens

by Peter Behrens

  “I’m going back downstairs,” she said. “Will you be coming down?”

  “Maybe in a little while.”

  She left his door open and, carrying the bottle, went down the hall and into Margo’s room. She fetched the vermouth and gin from her sister’s closet and took all three downstairs. The tea party had perked up, shaken its tail. Important men with important wartime jobs who had not been able to show up for a midday funeral were putting in appearances now, keeping Jerry the barman busy and keeping one eye cocked for Frankie’s father, who was no longer important but might still, for all they knew, be dangerous. Some of the middle-aged were in uniform but they all looked like businessmen. It was starting to feel like a hundred cocktail parties she had been to since the war began.

  Iseult was busy organizing sandwiches and coffee for the army drivers and chauffeurs who were waiting out in the cold and wet. Frankie knew her mother had seen her slinking downstairs with the bottles in her arms, but she hadn’t said anything. If her father was determined to flee to New York City, her mother wouldn’t try to stop him. Maybe she’d go to fetch him afterwards, maybe she wouldn’t. Maybe this time he’d have to bring himself home or not come back at all.

  Jerry gave Frankie a nod as she set down the bottles on the bar. He was mixing up a crystal shaker of martinis.

  “Reinforcements,” she said. “Looks like you might need them.”

  He smiled. The crackling, slushing sound of ice in the shaker reminded Frankie of the world outside the house. Suddenly she wanted to go there, and someone to take her. This party was no good, not what her soul needed, and if she retreated upstairs to her maidenly boudoir or walked down Murray Hill to sit brooding and decorously weeping on a bench in the lilac park, she’d only feel nastier and more wicked.

  “Jerry, I’m going to the Green Lantern to meet a few friends.”

  Jerry raised his eyebrows. He was busy filling glasses. She watched him start handing out the martinis.

  “Do you think that’s terrible?” she said.

  “I’m not the one that just buried my brother, Frankie. If you want to duck out, who’s to say you can’t?”

  “Can you do me a favour?”

  “Probably.”

  “I don’t want to disturb Mother but I don’t want her getting worried when she sees I’m gone. Will you tell her I’ve gone out to meet some pals? Tell her I won’t be late but not to wait up for me either.”

  “Sure thing, Frankie.”

  “You don’t have to say the Green Lantern. You can just say you don’t know where.”

  “Comme vous voulez.”

  In the pantry she picked up the wall phone. Maids galloped by with trays of cocktail sandwiches and clean glasses while she dialled for a cab. She gave the dispatcher the address, then changed her mind. “Tell your driver not to come to the house,” she said. “He should meet me at the corner: Skye Avenue and Murray Hill.”

  Feeling a pang of guilt over abandoning her mother and Margo, she went back to the party and worked the crowd for a few minutes. Father Tom was on his second or third martini. People were stuffing themselves on sandwiches and bouchées and getting plastered, all in honour of Mike. Keeping an eye on her wristwatch, she was working her way towards the stairs when Iseult came out of the kitchen looking crazily distinguished in her old black dress, so removed from the edges of her own feelings, so scared.

  Frankie stood waiting on the stairs while her mother made her way towards her through the jolly, vibrant crowd, ignoring any mourners who tried to speak to her. “I have to see your father,” she told Frankie.

  So Frankie grabbed her hand and they went upstairs together, treading on the Persian runner — purple, blue, scarlet, and gold — that Joe had bought years before from an Armenian in — Atlanta? Tampa? Havana? Somewhere down south.

  The door of the study was shut. “Joe,” her mother said. Iseult wasn’t pleading, wasn’t even summoning him. She said his name as if it was the name of a place, an island, a country where they’d all lived once.

  Frankie heard the squeal of casters and him getting to his feet. She waited for him to open the door, but he didn’t. She jiggled the knob. The door was locked. Still holding her mother by the hand, she rapped on the wood panels.

  “Go away,” he murmured.

  “Daddy, it’s Mother. Mother’s here. You have to let her in, Daddy.” Frankie didn’t dare look at Iseult. There were no sounds from the other side of the door. They all just stood there.

  Everything’s coming apart, Frankie thought. Nothing is left, nothing that will hold.

  “Joe.” Her mother’s voice was a weak scrape of sound. Hardly any air made it out of her throat.

  No response from him.

  She would take her mother with her in the cab and run away somewhere, just the two of them. Or Margo too, if she wanted to come, and Maddie. Maybe to a hotel. It was just about impossible to get a decent hotel room on short notice in wartime, but she had pull at the Mount Royal, thanks to her job; she could probably get them the Vice-regal Suite. Or maybe they’d go down to Maine.

  The bolt slid back, the door opened, and her father stood there in his silk smoking jacket, a cigarette curdling between his fingers. She could see one of the volumes of her mother’s photographs open on the desk. Ignoring Frankie, he reached out and took Iseult by the hand. As he drew her into the room she almost tripped over the doorsill, but he caught and held her. She was crying.

  Frankie turned and walked away. She knew she was deserting her parents, or maybe she was just saving herself. When she was halfway down the hall, she heard her father’s door shut, and she glanced back. They were inside together. She hoped they’d stay there for the duration.

  She hurried to her room, kicking off her shoes and quickly exchanging the black dress for her favourite red one. Sitting down at her dressing table, she lit a cigarette, gave her hair a good, fierce brushing, and put on fresh lipstick. Then she grabbed her pocketbook and ran down the back stairs.

  Cars were parked up and down the street. The black rain had let up. All the chauffeurs and army drivers had gathered around one big Packard, where they were eating the sandwiches and drinking the coffee Iseult had sent out. Frankie greeted a couple of boys she recognized from the crap game that always seemed to be running on one floor or another at the Mount Royal Hotel. She was at the corner when the old Dodge taxi made the turn from Westmount Avenue and came chugging and clanking up the hill. She recognized the driver from the stand of cabs outside the Mount Royal. Part of her job was putting important people into taxis.

  “Sorry about your brother, Frankie,” the cabby said, as she settled into the front seat. “Nice guy, I heard. Too bad.”

  She could have been in a bomber lifting off: that was how it felt leaving behind the house on Skye Avenue with all the people and the feelings it contained. She was light-headed from having gotten away so quickly.

  “Where for?” the cabby asked.

  “The Green Lantern.” It would be flashy and noisy, jammed with zoots and black marketeers and sailors and airmen.

  The cabby made a face. “They water their booze.”

  “Everywhere does,” she snapped. “It’s wartime.”

  That closed the conversation, which was just fine with her. She was glad to be in the old car, to be moving. She had that giddy feeling she got in cars sometimes: that nothing could touch her. Would her parents survive? It was up to them, she told herself, as the cab swung around in the street and started down the hill. The only person she could handle was herself.

  MONTREAL, APRIL 1946

  Home

  Johnny was in the office when his father-in-law came by to sign some papers. It was nearly five o’clock, and when Joe offered him a lift home, he accepted. He found his mother-in-law waiting in the Chrysler and climbed into the back seat. The car was pretty worn out. New cars were still hard to come by — you had to be on a list. He was still a little surprised that Margo’s old man, with all his contacts, wasn’t h
igher on the list. His own father had just taken delivery of a brand-new Cadillac, a 1941 model, though the dealer was calling it a ’46.

  Louis-Philippe had told him that Joe O’Brien had made a lot of enemies in Ottawa when he tried to shut down his firm with a dozen important military contracts already in hand. “They thought he was trying to — how would you say? — put the squeeze on them. Very nearly he went to jail. Only my excellent counsel and impressive stickhandling saved him from a prison sentence. He paid considerable fines, however, not to mention legal fees. All for the sake of — what, exactly? Je ne lui comprends pas. I never have. Ces irlandais — illogiques.”

  To Margo it was simple. “Daddy hated the war. After Mike left, he didn’t want anything to do with it, but he had to do what they wanted. Anyway, he could never bear to break a contract.”

  They were almost in Westmount when the old man announced he wanted to detour by Notre-Dame-des-Neiges Cemetery to inspect the arborvitae shrubs the O’Briens’ gardener was supposed to have planted on each side of the family headstone.

  “You don’t mind, do you?” Joe said, glancing over his shoulder.

  “Joe,” said Iseult, “why now? Johnny just wants to go home.”

  It was true. He had been looking forward to getting home, seeing his wife and daughter, sitting down in the living room with the newspaper and a glass of Scotch. But what the hell. “By all means, let’s go.”

  He’d demobbed in November ’45, one of the first to get home. His daughter, Maddie, had seemed like any other kid to him: nothing special. He’d found his father amazingly old, his sister Lulu a Sacred Heart nun, and his wife a cold, brittle stranger.

  Margo had wanted to stay on at her parents’ house for a while longer but he had insisted they find a place of their own immediately. She hated the first apartment he found for them on Victoria Avenue. He had to break the lease, forfeiting a month’s rent. Now they were in a flat on Carthage Avenue in Lower Westmount.

  A couple of months after getting home he had started an affair with a girl he met on the 105 streetcar. She reminded him of girls he had known in England. He took her to the same hotels he’d gone to with Margo, but he felt trapped, compressed. Waking up, he had to force himself to get out of bed. He’d held on to his service sidearm, an American Colt .45, and sometimes he imagined taking the pistol down from its shelf in the hall closet, oiling it, loading it, walking into the woods in Murray Park with the gun heavy in his pocket, sitting down at the base of one of the big elms or maples, and shooting himself in the head.

  His father-in-law turned off Côte-des-Neiges Road, passed through the iron gates of the cemetery, and drove along the winding road. Johnny had never visited Notre-Dame-des-Neiges before; all the Taschereaus were buried in Arthabaska. Here the trees weren’t yet in leaf. There were fresh beds of daffodils, tulips. The grass was green. Robins hopped between the tombs. Everything smelled of damp ground.

  There had been one awful afternoon at a cemetery in Italy — where? Ortona. SS fanatics, children, armed with machine guns and a couple of 88s, had dug themselves in among the headstones and knocked out a pair of Trois-Rivières tanks.

  Notre-Dame was a big, sprawling field of death, but Margo’s father knew exactly where he was going. He pulled over onto the grass shoulder and they all got out of the car, which hissed and ticked and smelled of burnt oil.

  “Don’t come here that often,” the old man said. “Hardly at all over the winter. Snow up to my ass. Came out with Elise and Frankie a couple of weeks ago, at Easter.”

  “Margo comes out sometimes,” Johnny told him.

  “Yes, she does.”

  The ground was soft, a little muddy. Johnny thought of the bodies of SS children laid out in a row and his sergeant — Bellechasse, from Témiscamingue — executing two of the very badly wounded. The battalion had lost four men killed in that cemetery, four badly wounded.

  Things were terribly green at Notre-Dame-des-Neiges. His mother-in-law held onto his arm as they followed the old man in the watery April sunshine, shoes slurring in the thick grass. Margo’s father wore an overcoat and homburg and was carrying a walking stick; he was headed down a grassy row between gravestones. Some were quite elaborate: marble angels and granite lambs, plaster statues of saints in glass-fronted cases. Brown bedraggled palm leaves and lilies, leftovers from Easter week, were scattered on the ground.

  When they reached the O’Brien family plot, Johnny and his mother-in-law stood together and watched the old man peer at the gravestones as though seeing them for the first time. The headstone marking the O’Brien plot was a polished granite slab. There were two smaller, standard military-issue headstones: Margo’s brother and her uncle. Grattan had died in a plane crash in Alberta a few days before the war in Europe ended.

  “Well, these aren’t bad. Not bad at all.” The old man bent over and patted one of the new arborvitae, as yet only a couple of feet high. “Iseult thinks in twenty years they’ll be too big and bushy and we won’t be able to see the stones. But it won’t be my problem. I’ll let you and Margo and Madeleine and Frankie worry about that.”

  “Sure. We’ll chop ’em down.”

  “Just get someone out here in October with pruning shears. October — that’s when you want to clip these back.”

  Margo had said that her parents slipped away after Mike’s funeral. For three weeks she hadn’t heard a word and couldn’t call, as there was no phone at the Kennebunk house. She’d felt abandoned, she said, and it had nearly driven her crazy being left alone in the house with Madeleine, with Mike dead and Johnny at war and Frankie head-over-heels for some flyer. Finally she’d made Frankie borrow a car from one of the pilots she knew and they had driven to Kennebunk and found their parents living quietly, sailing their old sloop and working in their garden. After a week together they had all returned to the city and had remained in Montreal for the duration.

  Before Mike’s death the old man had never written to his son-in-law, but in the last eighteen months of the war Johnny had received a letter from him every few weeks, always neatly typed on business stationery. Joe reported Madeleine’s progress at ice-skating and her reactions to various animals at the Lafontaine Park zoo. He outlined his techniques for raising pumpkins, cucumbers, and potatoes in garden plots he dug into the lawn at Skye Avenue. At the bottom of each letter he transcribed without comment one or two clever things Madeleine had said. His letters had been far easier to read than Margo’s outpourings. In one of her last letters just before the war ended, she had confessed an urge to give up Madeleine, to leave her at the door of an orphanage and flee to New York or Los Angeles and start her life over.

  “Really, Joe, we ought to get going,” Iseult said. “Johnny wants to get home, I’m sure.”

  The old man tapped the metal end of his walking stick on his son’s stone, then on Grattan’s. “Some people thought Grattan plowed his plane into the ground,” he said, without looking up. “Deliberately. No accident. He was the CO of a base; they were training aircrew from all over. Poles, Australians. He wasn’t in good shape, was what I heard. Been drinking.”

  “You can’t say that,” Iseult said. “You don’t know for sure.”

  “It was Tom who said so, but you’re right, who knows? I’m glad you made it home safe, Johnny. You have your life back, so hold on to it, hold on to what you have.”

  Johnny suddenly felt as exposed as any of the hundreds of wounded he’d seen in Italy: men, women, infantrymen, children, their clothes blown to rags, their bodies torn apart or smeared with garish bruises. He was shivering, but his in-laws didn’t seem to notice. They were gazing at the stones. Maybe they were praying, but he didn’t think so.

  At some point it had started to rain, soft, lissome springtime rain, not the hard-driving winter rain of Italy. Rain like smoke.

  “Joe,” Iseult said softly.

  The old man turned to have another look at his arborvitae shrubs. Then he started back to the car, which Johnny could see at the end of a
row of stone urns and angels. The wet gave a powerful gleam to the grey Chrysler. The moisture had thickened the grass, and when he and Iseult started after the old man, their footsteps made sibilant brushing sounds.

  “There’s nothing really to say,” Iseult said. “That’s the truth of it, Jean. There is absolutely nothing to say.”

  And for the first time since coming back from the war he almost felt at home, which was strange, since it was a bloody cemetery, after all, and who the hell wanted to feel at home there.

  CAPE BRETON, JULY 1960

  Lost and Found

  The squeaking highs and catches of the tune came flying through the fog and dark like birds — swallows, small and quick. They liked to play a fiddle in that town.

  Aboard the yawl Sea Son Joe was restless in his berth. After retiring early he had been unable to find sleep. It was densely foggy, but Son was safe on her mooring in Baddeck harbour, and God knows he was weary enough.

  They had picked up the mooring that morning. What he had seen of Cape Breton so far, sailing up from St. Peter’s, reminded him as much as any place had of the Pontiac country, though they didn’t have any white pine. Even the local speech was familiar: scraps of French he’d overheard from truck drivers on the government wharf, and two old women at MacIsaac’s store gabbling in what sounded like Ottawa Valley Irish. Albert MacIsaac had said firmly, “No, not Irish. The Gaelic. Scotch Gaelic.”