Until dawn she lay trembling convulsively and weeping with her face in the pillow so as not to waken Marguerite, this enemy who knew. Finally a pale sunbeam found its way beneath the lowered blind and into the room. Only then did she stop tossing and turning. She lay quiet, dry-eyed. She felt that she had been submitted to such torture during the night that her heart at last had lost all feeling. Her love for Jean was dead. Her dreams were dead, and with them her youth. At the idea that her youth was dead she felt a last twinge of pain, as slight as a spreading circle on the water which leaves only calm behind.
And indeed she was calm now, with a stupefying peace that went down to the deepest layers of her being. No more memories, an end to joy, an end to all regret. What was left was a passive waiting, contrary to reason, contrary to herself, no longer desperate but still less susceptible to hope: a simple kind of waiting inhabited her spirit if it had come to stay.
Her decision was made. Whatever happened, whatever the result, she would never tell anyone. She would allow herself to live, accept what others did to her and around her, and she would wait. For what, she didn't know, but she would wait. She was sustained by a pale and feeble thread of pride at not having given herself away, and also by the thought that she had won time in which to reflect.
The neighbourhood was waking up. She heard wheels bumping along the rough street and bottles rattling in a basket as the milkman passed, then a happy whistled tune and the cheerful sound of trotting hooves. In her heart the need to live in spite of everything found its expression in a stubborn defiance. This was not the end. Because she couldn't have what she wanted, she refused whatever was offered: but there must be miracles, she thought, for people like herself, bold and self-sufficient. Her eyes, heavy with sleep, were fixed on the thin ray of sunlight growing stronger in the room.
TWENTY-FOUR
After Florentine had fled from her parents' home, Azarius returned at around ten o'clock.
"I found just the thing," he said, still in the doorway. "Five rooms, a bathroom and a bit of a balcony. And a little yard in the back to dry your clothes, Rose-Anna. I made the deal. If you want, we can move first thing in the morning."
Rose-Anna had remained slumped over the kitchen table after Florentine left. It took a while for Azarius' words to penetrate her torpor. At first she heard only the sound of his voice, but slowly the words sank in. Her hands moved in the air, as if trying to overcome the sullen weight of inertia. Then, suddenly, she was on her feet, reaching out for support. A gleam of relief lit her brown eyes.
"You're fooling! You found one? You found a house?"
For the moment that was enough. Where was it? How was it? She didn't even think of asking these questions. They had found a shelter, a corner for the family, an exclusive refuge for its joys and sorrows. This in itself was a kind of grace, a touch of order in their disarray. She forced herself to get under way. She now realized to what extent she had been revolted by the notion of sharing a roof with strangers. Their whole way of living exposed to the gaze of outsiders! No, a shed, a barn, any black hole would be better than the torture she had been through for the last hours.
She looked up courageously at Azarius. Energy was coming back to her in rapid, consoling waves. A woman of the working class, she seemed to have an inexhaustible source of energy. Holding the edge of the table, she leaned toward her husband.
"Listen," she said, "why don't we move right now, tonight? It's not too late!"
Azarius looked at her with surprise and, finally, submission. Ever since the night when he had dreamed of running away he had been twice as gentle as before, as if he were trying to pay a heavy and implacable debt to Rose-Anna. And his latest bad luck had inclined him to a kind of passivity toward her orders. More lost than he had ever been, humiliated, hemmed-in, learning at last to hide his thirst for freedom, for a fresh start, he was almost pathetic in his readiness to please her.
"I'd put us down for a truck tomorrow morning, but I don't see why I couldn't get it tonight. I'll go and see right now, if you like. Take me fifteen minutes."
"Go ahead," she said energetically. "If we hurry we can get a few beds up there and sleep without the strangers this very night. That's worth a bit of extra bother. You can always come and get the rest tomorrow morning."
And she added, more softly.
"You know, two families getting up together tomorrow morning — we'd all need the stove and the sink at the same time, it just doesn't make sense. And besides. . . "
She raised her arms and let them fall wearily to her sides.
". . . besides, it's nice to be home, Azarius!"
He left at once, and she started in bravely, collecting frying pans, pots and saucepans and packing them in cardboard boxes she had kept ready for the move, first a layer of folded linen, then a row of pots and pans, then another layer of linen. Kneeling on the kitchen floor, she filled one large box, glancing from time to time at the clock. Lord, how slow she was! Often out of breath, she would have to stop and give her heart a rest.
She finally had to admit that she couldn't do it all herself. Much against her will she had to wake the children. Stealthily she opened the dining room door and tiptoed across the room. The privacy of the other family was for her inviolable. She respected it with the same intensity as she protected her own. The boards creaked despite her care, and she cast a compassionate glance at the strangers' children sleeping on chairs put end to end. She was not indifferent to the universality of misfortune, but she was suspicious of pity spread too thin. She was accustomed to shutting off too much concern for others, economizing tenderness and keeping watch on her own impulses of generosity. Charity began at home. Just now her reticence fell away, and her usual reserve, as she spoke to the mother:
"You make yourself at home, now. Just use anything you need. We won't be in the way for long."
She was relieved, as if she had rid herself of her vague burden of resentment.
She went into Philippe's small room and called softly to her children in the dark.
"Get up," she said, "and don't make a sound."
Their eyes blinked and they sat up frightened in their beds. She helped them to dress.
"We're going home," she said.
Her voice in the half-dark was firm and reassuring.
She dressed them all except Gisele, whom she left to sleep, and took the others out on tiptoe, bringing along their quilts and pillows. In the kitchen she calmly gave each one his task, not losing a minute about her own work. Kneeling on the floor again she said:
"Yvonne, you're not a butterfingers. Take my best dishes and wrap each one in newspaper. Each one separate, now," she warned.
"And you, my little man," she said to Albert, "don't make a racket and don't bang yourself, and go get Mamma's washtub behind the door."
Lucille, too, wanted a job. Rose-Anna said:
"All right, you can help Yvonne, but mind you don't break things, eh, child?"
They were surprised at this tone of their mother's, so calm and placid, almost grave. Their fears had turned to something like joy. Philippe came home, and his mother didn't even ask him where he had been or frown as she usually did. She quietly told him to go down to the cellar and bring up more boxes. Not a single reproach!
At first the children worked silently, but then, emboldened by their mother's serenity, they began to show their enthusiasm for this midnight move. Their voices rose, and little arguments broke out as they all tried to perform the same task at once. Rose-Anna still didn't get angry. It seemed as if she'd never get angry again! But she was tired, and she did need a little quiet.
"Hey," she said. "Don't make such a racket! This isn't our place anymore."
And with the shade of a tired smile she added:
"Just try to contain yourselves! It won't be long. We'll soon be home."
Home!
That was an old word, one of the first the children had ever learned. You used it without thinking, a hundred times a day. It had me
ant so many different things! They'd used it once for a dank basement apartment on St. James Street, and again for the three-room place where they had stifled under the roof of a dingy building on St. Antoine. Home was an elastic word and even meaningless at times, for it evoked not a single place but maybe twenty shelters scattered through the neighbourhood. It was rich in regrets and nostalgia, and it always meant uncertainty. It was related to the annual migration. It was coloured by the seasons. It sounded in your heart like an unforeseen departure, a flight, for when you heard it you could imagine that you also heard the shrill cry of migratory birds.
As she said the word, their small faces looked at her, lit up with happiness, but with a shyness too that made them all stop talking at once!
But Rose-Anna, having given them something to dream about, knew that she had to protect them against illusions.
"Now, don't start thinking we're moving to some millionaire's apartment," she said. "There'll be lots of dirty corners to clean out. Remember how dirty it was when we arrived here? You can't expect they'll leave it clean for you." And that reminded her: "Did anybody think about a broom? That's important. We'll be glad to have a broom on hand when we get there. With a little water and a broom you can get rid of the worst dirt you ever saw. I always say, a broom, the first go-off!"
She was not usually very loquacious with her youngest children. The language established between them was one of unspoken tenderness and friendly scolding, rather than conversation. But this evening, upset by Florentine's departure, she tried to atone by drawing the little ones closer to her. Tonight she felt so lonely that she would have tried to make friends with the least of living creatures.
She talked to them continually, as if they were grownups. Instead of placing herself at their level, she called them up to hers with a kind of tender gravity. She told them astonishing and serious things, looking them straight in the eye. Or she disconcerted them with a word said in passing, thrown away, or a sigh that belonged to the new confidence she placed in them.
"Sure, we've got our troubles" she said. "It's not very nice, moving like this in the middle of the night. But I don't know, just look at other people, we're no worse off than they are. With the war and all, there's some a lot more miserable than we are. Poor folks, and what troubles!"
Then she was silent, wondering if she should tell Azarius tonight about Florentine running away, or if she should leave it until morning. Suddenly she saw that she had done well not to mention the scene, that this was a bad dream that must always remain a secret.
Several boxes were filled now. All together they started on another, kneeling around it in the middle of the kitchen. Rose-Anna felt an urge to stretch her arms around them all, to include them in a single embrace and reassure them.
"Whatever it's like it can't be worse than our last house," she said. "Now that was tight quarters for you. At least we've got more room in the new one. Five rooms, your father said. Maybe there's one for you, Yvonne. We mustn't build castles in Spain, that's a waste of time till we see the place, but five rooms sounds better than here. There's a balcony, your father says. We can put some flowers out there. And a yard, that'll be handy, we'll grow a few vegetables if it's big enough. And like I said, never mind about the dirt. You can always get rid of it somehow."
All this time their busy hands were emptying the cupboards and stripping the walls. The homey atmosphere dissolved. The only things preserving it were the old clock on its ledge trimmed with crepe paper, and a few caps hanging on the wall.
Their best times had always been just before a move.
When Azarius came back, the kitchen was already filled with big boxes tied with cord and piles of utensils. They had the knack of moving swiftly, and could decamp in an hour like gypsies. Ingenious and skilful, they knew how to pack a multitude of objects in easy loads.
Together they began to carry their things to the light truck, with a marvellous kind of tacit agreement on how it was to be done. Philippe and his father carried the heaviest things, one walking backwards, and Rose-Anna looked after the fragile articles, putting them carefully in the depths of the space beneath the tarpaulin. The little children ran behind her, one with the precious kitchen clock in his frail arms, another with a smudged, limp doll she had just spotted under a pile of washing. Albert, grown provident and wise, brought up the rear, tripping under a load of firewood that came right to his chin.
Oh, the strange things that make up a household, and how pitiful they look when exposed in this way one by one, without a house or home!
In the light before the door a group of onlookers and children stood gaping.
"Hey! The Lacasse family's moving! Looks like they're in a hurry."
Rose-Anna heard the remark and blessed the night that covered their departure, obscuring their poor belongings.
Too often had they moved in the light of day, when their yellowed mattresses, rickety chairs with legs in the air, scratched old tables, rusty metal bedsteads, blotched mirrors — all the visible signs of their indigence — took their place in the great procession of families filling the streets each first of May, on the move, their tatters flying in the wind.
At last their most necessary effects were piled in a well-established and traditional order: food in a large basket which Rose-Anna took herself; night clothes in an old suitcase; then the table, the chairs and even the kitchen stove. Rose-Anna had been very firm: "You've got to unload that tonight, right away, Azarius. Late or not. Who knows, tonight or early tomorrow morning we might need hot water."
When the kitchen was almost empty it looked very big and strangely mute to Rose-Anna when she went in alone for a final look. Her pretext was that she wanted to make sure nothing had been forgotten. This was her best guess at the confused feeling that brought her back and held her in this naked room.
Here Eugène had spent his last night before joining up, and this roof would never see him with his family again. Who knew if they would ever see him again? And here Daniel had played his innocent games with his serious face before the illness struck him down. And here, on a cold and grey October dawn, she had discovered she was about to be a mother, at age forty, and for the twelfth time. Here Florentine had looked at her with supplicating eyes.
Florentine! Her first child! Her heart went out to the girl, though she was still filled with anger, doubt and disappointed love. The whole thing didn't make sense. For sure, Florentine would come back, she'd explain. And maybe there was nothing to explain. Rose-Anna clung desperately to that hope. Florentine, as gentle and pious as Yvonne when she was younger, couldn't have done such a thing. Now Rose-Anna was full of regret for her own behaviour. She ripped a leaf from the calendar still hanging on the wall and scribbled with an awkward hand: "We've moved. You can sleep in Philippe's room tonight, and tomorrow I'll send Yvonne or Lucille to the store to show you where we live." She hesitated a second, then wrote: "your mother."
Relieved, she took her coat and hat. Softly she opened the door to the dining room and, without putting a light on, took from the buffet a few pious objects from which she was never separated. The woman whose name she didn't know shifted in the dark. Rose-Anna, moved, wished her a good night.
"Nobody'll be back tonight except maybe my daughter" she said. "We're leaving now. You're in your home now."
Behind her Azarius entered. He went to Philippe's room and took Gis£le in his arms, wrapping her in a woollen blanket. The three of them, very close together, left the house.
She took the sleeping child on her lap, and Azarius started the truck. The rumbling of the motor echoed to the very depths of her tired brain. She turned to spy through the rear cab window to make sure the children were all in the truck. She saw them standing or perched on the piled-up furniture, silhouetted against the raw light of the arc lamp. Everything she had been able to save from disaster was there, and she felt most of her riches were intact. A twinge of guilt touched her believer's heart: she had doubted divine provi dence, she had forji time
refused to hope. But this regret itself, the moment she felt it, had brought her close again to the One who had been the source of her courage. She laid her hand on Azarius' arm and said softly:
"All right, we can go!"
He drove off quickly, the street dark in front of him. He had never been in the habit of recognizing his own responsibility in his family's poverty, but this midnight flit caught him with his defences down. An emotion he had seldom felt tightened his throat.
He pushed the truck a little too fast, and the tires squealed at the first sharp corner.
Much later that night, when the children were asleep on the mattresses laid on the floor around her, Rose-Anna was awake and wondering: is this a house where people can be happy? She had always thought that some houses had a predisposition to happiness, and others, by a quirk of fate, were destined to shelter nothing but misfortune.
She still hadn't had a good look at it. They had forgotten their light bulbs, and had pitched camp by the flame of Azarius' lighter and many matches.
She hadn't seen the house, but she had had the feel of it, smelled it, touched it and, above all, listened to it.
Shortly after midnight she had felt a long tremor at the approach of a train. She understood at once, and with the courageous goodwill that sustained her, resigned herself to the fact: there was always a drawback. There had to be. Sometimes it was the lack of light, or a factory nearby, or not enough rooms. Here, it was the railroad.
No wonder we got it cheap, she thought. This close to the tracks, you can hardly live in it. I'll never get used to that noise.
But she didn't give up. Not yet. She never gave up that quickly.
You've got to take the good points with the bad, she thought. In the morning I'll see how it really looks. Mustn't see the dark side right away.
Azarius moved beside her. She leaned toward him and laid her hand softly on his arm to see if he was awake.
The Tin Flute Page 25
