Voice-Over

by Carole Corbeil

  “Yes, dear,” Julia said.

  “Can we go now, Mum?”

  Odette looked at her sisters. She was trying not to smile. If she looked too happy, it would invite some teasing.

  Julia took her apron off and folded it. “Yes Mam’,” she said, winking at Kathleen and Doris. “Yes Mam’, your highness bride.”

  “There goes the bride,” Doris said.

  “All dressed in pride,” Kathleen added, and both of them laughed.

  Odette threw them a dark look.

  “C’t’une joke, Odette. Voyons donc,” Doris said.

  “Regarde-moi ça,” Béribée said, “un autre speech sur la race. Le maudit verrat de Duplessis.”

  But they were out of there like a shot, holding hands like girls, running as fast as they could up the stairs and into the wild rose wallpapered bower of Julia’s bedroom.

  BÉRIBÉE SWIRLED THE SHAVING brush around and around the soap in the chipped pale blue soapdish on the lip of his sink in his room. The walls had once been cream. They were now grey, a paler version of the battleship-grey verandahs of the courtyard Béribée could see through the window. It was snowing, and the roof of the greystone across the courtyard was covered in a thick layer of white.

  Béribée had to work fast now, the hot water was steaming up the mirror with the border of sandblasted flowers. The water flowed, eddied around the rust stain near the drain. Lathering the left side of his face, Béribée imagined himself walking Odette down the aisle. He could almost see her proud neck underneath the white veil, he could almost feel the warmth of her slender arm, as he scraped soap and hair and flesh from the side of his face.

  Odette was going to wear Julia’s wedding dress. Julia had pronounced peau de soie as po de soy when they got married, and she was still pronouncing it po de soy now that Odette was getting married. He thought she’d learn French. But she’d learned very little, and what she did learn she pronounced like a vache espagnole.

  Béribée rinsed the razor under the tap, looked at the neat trail of scraped flesh he’d just created on the left side of his face. It was getting hot in the bathroom, he could feel the hairs of his armpits getting clammy with sweat. Goddamn Julia had been at the thermostat again.

  Odette, married. The same Odette who stole books from him. She gripped books so hard she broke their spines. He knew that she hid them under her bed, books like the Hemingway one where the earth moves, or the John O’Hara ones where women with chipped fingernails long for their husbands’ best friends. And she bought and devoured photo-romans, too, piles of them. The actors looked Italian. The women with pencilled eyebrows were always betraying men with skinny mustaches and swelling up with illegitimate children. Everybody looked aroused, even when they were cooking soup.

  The left side was done now, fresh and clean, with a couple of nicks at the neck. He’d never been able to shave without cutting, without giving a little blood to begin the day.

  But Odette never showed him that face, the face that read photo-romans, the face that flirted with that pipsqueak Roger Beaulieu. No, what Odette showed him was the face of an agneau saiglante. Innocent. Martyred. Just like Julia’s face. Just like his mother’s face to think of it, pious Maman who’d sent him to a pensionnat to make a priest out of him. Those goddamn priests had taught him a thing or two about their God; what they did to boys, you wouldn’t do to a dog. Made them expose their back-sides and strapped them with thick leather straps. Told them they had the devil between their legs.

  It was so hot in the house, goddamn Julia and the thermostat, so hot as he began to lather the right side of his face. Julia was forever jacking up the thermostat when he wasn’t looking, and the hot air parched his throat, not to mention what it did to the monthly bills. He punished her by pushing the thermostat down when she was not looking, so that the house went hot and cold with their war.

  His right side had the dark eye, the brown eye. It was the mark of his specialness to have been born with a brown eye and a blue eye. Béribée had always liked his brown eye best. It stood out in photographs. He used to cut a dashing figure, that’s what everybody said when he was a kid, and it was on the strength of being dashing that he’d run away to la Californie when he was eighteen. He had to run. He would have died in that pensionnat smelling of custard and wax and humiliation. He learned English with the men in the boxcars travelling south. Before the Depression, it was. In the low twenties when everybody was supposed to be rich. He’d reached California and worked as a stuntman in Mack Sennett comedies, running on top of trains, jumping from car to car, falling from roofs like one of Lucifer’s angels. Then he’d done westerns, and that’s where his career came to an abrupt end when a horse threw him onto a fake cactus. Lost the use of a kidney there in the desert by Santa Monica. That had slowed him down, brought him back to Montreal, to a car showroom on Sainte-Catherine Street, and that’s where he was when Julia came in one day with her father to buy a family car. She was wearing a yellow cloche hat and driving gloves. She had a driver’s licence, a diploma from Miss Grady’s secretarial school, and blue eyes so alive they flashed like mirrors. He showed that girl the inside of a Ford like it was the inside of his heart.

  That girl vanished the moment she had Odette.

  There was a picture of him, taken when they lived in Halifax, that he’d always liked. He was standing in khaki pants by the boat yard, holding Odette by the hand. Julia must have taken the picture. Odette looked like she was standing on three feet of air. He looked dashing in his captain’s hat, like the navy man he never got to play on account of his bad kidneys.

  Julia and Odette had never thought about that, that was for sure. All they ever did was pray for him, just like his maudite catholique de mère did. The two of them with their rosaries kneeling around Cardinal Léger on the radio, Julia doing Hail Marys to the cardinal’s Je Vous Salue Mars, Odette looking like she was in a church basement movie, with roses falling out of the skies for tubercular virgins. Praying for him, for chrissakes.

  All his life stuck with a bunch of whiners and squealers. Feeling the blood pound behind the skin of his forehead. Béribée took a towel and wiped the leftover soap from his face, then brought the towel down to wipe his armpits. The towel would smell but he didn’t care. He was too hot to care. His right hand gripped the razor.

  Jaw clenched, skin tight and dry from the soap, Béribée put the razor away in the medicine cabinet behind him and slammed the cabinet door. So hot. “Julia,” he yelled. “Julia, for chrissakes, turn that goddamn thermostat down. Now. I said NOW. Do you HEAR me, Julia? Do you HEAR me? NOW!”

  “THAT’LL BE YOUR FATHER about the thermostat,” her mother said.

  “Sometimes I could kill him,” Odette said.

  “Don’t say that about your father.”

  “I can’t wait.”

  “What?”

  “Mum.”

  “Oh, what am I going to do without you?” Julia said while powdering Odette’s face. Odette stared at herself in the three-way mirrored vanity. Her blue eyes looked scared, just like her mother’s.

  Béribée was still yelling like a bull in heat.

  Julia left off the powdering and opened her bedroom door. “I-never-touched-the-thermostat!” she yelled. And came back in, and slammed the door, and took the powder puff, all beige from the powder, and started to work on Odette’s face again.

  “Mum.” Odette could hardly breathe from the powder flying around her face. It settled in a fine dust on the mahogany vanity.

  “I like a house warm, is there something wrong with that? I ask you, is there something wrong with that?”

  “Mum.”

  “I do my best. Is there something wrong with that?”

  “Mum, please don’t.”

  “What does he want? I looked after him. I looked after you.”

  “That’s too much powder, Mum.” Odette was almos
t crying now, looking at her beige-creased face.

  “You came first, all of you.”

  Odette took her mother’s hand in her own, and said stop. None of it now, she wanted none of it, not the words, not the cold place inside her that said me, it was me who looked after you, it was me who got in between. She shook her head. She stopped her mouth, her beautiful mouth in the mirror, from saying I wanted, for once. She said Mum, please get dressed. And took a big wad of cold cream and spread it on her cheeks, and then took a kleenex and wiped all of the beige powdery mess off her face.

  BÉRIBÉE MARCHED ODETTE DOWN the aisle, there was no other word for it, one two, one two, while she strained backwards, wanting the train to flow behind her smooth as icing. It had been snowing heavy water-drenched flakes when they’d walked from the car to the church, and some had settled on Odette’s eyelashes. She didn’t dare dab the wet around her eyes, for fear her mascara would streak.

  Dragged up the aisle by her father, Odette could see that it was still snowing. The sun would have shot rubies and blues and purples through the stained-glass windows; but they looked almost black in this weather, and the air smelled of chrysanthe-mums, a bitter fall smell. Her father had said arrête-moi ça when Odette said she wanted lilies. “Lilies in February for chrissakes,” he said. “I’m spending enough money as it is.” And when she said that Roger could get them a deal, he’d scoffed. “C’est moi qui paye, okay? Pas ton p’tit nouveau riche.”

  It was all going too quickly. They were almost halfway up the aisle and the choir was just starting to sing “Ave Maria.”

  “Daddy,” Odette whispered through clenched teeth, “Daddy, slow down.” He looked straight ahead, neck full of razor nicks.

  People were looking at her, from either side. Roger’s people on her left, her people on her right. The O’Shea clan was crying already, her aunts in corsages with silver bells left over from Christmastime, her uncles holding felt hats over their crotches. Sometimes they could look so silly, those O’Shea men, grinning, full of laughs, the same laughs for every occasion, as if they spent their lives orbiting churches and church halls, spreading Irish cheer like God’s own archangels.

  Odette didn’t want to be laughed at on her wedding day. But they were bound to do it, her Irish uncles, bound to say to her mother, managed to peel her off the mirror, did ya, Julia? or some such thing. And her mother would laugh and say it was a job, Frankie, but I was equal to it, as if Odette wasn’t standing right there. They always did that, smashed things by teasing, as if she belonged to them because she’d been a child once. Their eyes said she was theirs to play with. Like her father’s eyes. Her father’s eyes made her feel like stone.

  Walking up the aisle, his arm wrapped around her arm, Odette thought about the tightrope that figured in so many of her dreams. She walked high above the crowd, in love with her own agility and grace under the bright lights, but there was always a point where she could feel the crowd below willing her to fall. She could never fight it, the force of that crowd, could never fight their will. In the dreams, she always fell.

  She wasn’t falling, she was being dragged to the altar by her father, but her knees shook like they did in her dreams. She could feel herself wobbling a little on her peau de soie high heels. No, this wasn’t like falling, but it wasn’t what she’d imagined either. She’d imagined floating in white to the sound of “Ave Maria,” gliding to a choral destiny, eyes like lights making her body shimmer.

  The Beaulieu side of the church was a sea of black hair and dark faces. The women wore heavy sheared beaver coats and reddish minks, the men held on to sheared lamb hats. Monsieur Beaulieu looked annoyed, as usual. With anything concerning Roger, Monsieur Beaulieu put on a special face of disapproval, of I will not be caught hoping. His children called him Seraphim behind his back, after the miser in Les Belles Histoires des Pays d’en Haut who was so cheap that he had the legs of his dead, adored wife cut off so she could fit into a bargain coffin.

  Odette gave Monsieur Beaulieu her pure profile, just before reaching the altar. It was meant to say I know what to give Roger. You know nothing about him.

  The priest welcomed her, her father gave her away. There was no one to say don’t do it. No one to say I object. No one to say your heart is not yours to give, yet. She was twenty. He was twenty-five.

  Roger looked handsome, but his smile was forced. The smile was for the congregation, it said I’m a good boy, grinning and bearing it, but his eyes said something else: “Wait till we’re out of here.” It made Odette want to laugh. She wanted to say yes, we’re going to dump them all behind, forget them, it’s gonna be just you and me from now on. When he kissed her, he forgot where he was, and pushed his thigh between hers. She stepped back, embarrassed, but he caught her waist with one hand. “Mon p’tit chou,” he said, eyes gleaming, “à notre brillant avenir.”

  AT THE RECEPTION, IN the pale cherrywood Voyageur Room of the Mount Royal Hotel, Béribée drank too much and got into a fight with his brother Jean, and the O’Shea men came around to watch. The fight was about Duplessis. When the O’Shea men came, Béribée switched to English. He was right in front of Odette, who was being told by Paulette, her maid of honour, to get ready to cut the cake. He said he’d read in the paper this morning that Duplessis had given a speech in Saint-Louis entreating people to remember the ancestral dictum je me souviens, “le faire notre et s’en inspirer.” “Calice,” Béribée boomed. “With his bédaine hanging out and his goddamn gaggle of goons. Je me souviens all right, M’sieur Duplessis. Swing la packaise dans l’fond d’la boîte à bois. Le maudit Christ shoved down your throat. Wearing lies like a hair shirt on your back, gagging on hosties, kicked in the balls by pretty speeches about la race. La race, là, M’sieur Duplessis, it’s a bunch of losers kissing bishops’ asses, that’s what la race is. It’s Monsieur-le-Prosecutor Jeannot cruising la Main for les guidounes, c’est ça la race, M’sieur Duplessis.”

  Red-faced and sputtering, Béribée downed the rest of his scotch and soda.

  “Tu vas regretter ça,” Jean said, suspenders heaving.

  “Des belles guidounes avec des beaux beehives, c’est ça le payoff, hein Jean?”

  “Ta yueule, Béribée.”

  The O’Shea men stepped in between the brothers. Julia swooped down with the beribboned cake knife. Jean walked out of the Voyageur Room. His wife, Pauline, went after him. Béribée turned on the O’Shea men. “And what are you looking at?” he said. “What the Christ are you looking at?”

  Julia took his arm and tried to lead him away. “She’s going to pray for me,” he said to the O’Shea men. “That’s what she does, she gets down on her knees with the Cardinal Léger on the radio, and she prays for me. Don’t you, Julia?” But he let himself be dragged away like a boy, and Julia managed to calm him down. She talked to him and walked him around the room, one hand tucked under his arm, the other hand still carrying the beribboned cake knife.

  Eventually, Odette got the cake knife back from Julia, and cut the cake. It was fruitcake. None of the Beaulieux ate a bit of it, fruitcake being one of the many mysteriously bitter things that the English put in their mouths to celebrate special occasions.

  “Tu danses avec ton père?” Béribée said. He’d come up behind her. His breath smelled of scotch. He took her by the elbow, led her to the middle of the dance floor. She put her cold hand in his, and he twirled her and she was ashamed of her stiff dancing, feeling the old-fashioned grace in his limbs.

  “J’étais que’que chose dans mon temps,” he said. “Si tu savais, Odette, if you could have seen me.” He smiled. She looked at the shoulder of his suit, felt her forehead drawn to it, but pulled back at the last minute.

  “La musique,” he said, “ça été inventé pour flotter au-dessus de nos peines. Laisse-toi flotter, Odette.”

  THEY HONEYMOONED IN NEW York City. But before they left, they threw their own party at a restauran
t called Au Lutin Qui Bouffe.

  There is a photograph of them that night at the Lutin, where the specialty was suckling pig, petit cochon-au-lait. In the photograph, Odette is wearing a black dress with a square décolletage. She leans back against a cushioned banquette. She is smiling with dark lips, her blond hair frames her face in soft waves. Her eyes are round and innocent and smiling. Her eyes have nothing to do with what her hands are doing.

  Roger looks straight into the camera. His face says I will give you all I am, force it through the pores of my face. His face has nothing to do with what his hands are doing.

  His hands grip a small suckling pig on a formally set table. The pig is pale, its eyes are little slits, it is still not quite fully in the world, this little baby pig, and like an infant it must have been startled by the flash bulb that turned blue after it popped.

  Roger’s hands are holding the pig in place on the white table-cloth, and Odette’s hands are holding a small baby bottle, trying to get the little pig to suck on the rubber nipple.

  This is the photograph. Their eyes smiling, their hands trying to feed what they are destined to eat.

  ONE YEAR LATER, ALMOST to the day, Odette was lying on her bed fully clothed watching the ceiling. Baby Janine was sleeping in the next room, in a pale wood crib with a big bunny rabbit painted at the foot of it. The ceiling had little peaks made by sand mixed with paint. The peaks were dusty grey.

  She was so tired all the time. In the last stages of her pregnancy she had done so much: made muslin curtains, hemmed flannel sheets, covered the top of an old changing table with plastic pique, bought wooden wall figures, Mary and her lamb, Jack and Jill and their pail of water, and put them up on the walls of the baby’s room.

  She’d had to quit the job she had modelling in Eaton’s fashion shows in the fourth month of her pregnancy, when she was beginning to show. And she’d been glad to be at home to prepare the baby’s room. Roger said tu va être une bonne mère de famille, Odette. And that made her feel blessed and warm inside.