Saved

by Jack Falla

  The only smile in the otherwise solemn Richard funeral came just before the start of Mass, when the organist began playing Ave Maria and NHL deputy commissioner Scott Josten’s wife, Tatum, sitting a row in front of us, said in a stage whisper intended to make obvious her vast knowledge of classical music, “Oh, I just love Bach’s Ave.”

  In an equally loud voice Flipside said, “Actually this one’s Schubert’s.” Flipside was right, of course. But Flipper is toast if he has to go before the deputy commish in a disciplinary hearing.

  * * *

  On the walk back to the hotel I began thinking about my father, something I do only when we play in Montreal. Well, then and on Father’s Day. I wonder if he’s alive? Is he in Montreal? Will he be in the crowd at our game tomorrow? Watching on TV? I even wonder if he knows who I am, seeing as how my mom changed our name from his—Lachine—back to her family name, Savard.

  “How could a guy walk out on a young wife and a five-year-old?” I asked Cam at dinner. “Must’ve been a major scumbag.”

  “Either he thought he’d be better off without you or you’d be better off without him,” Cam said. That’s the trouble with Cam. He’s too logical.

  “He had the better-off-without-him part right,” I said. Growing up, I was sometimes glad not to have a father. Especially where hockey was concerned. I saw the way some of my teammates’ fathers drove their kids to be the player the father never was. The only thing my mother drove me to was games and practices. She waited around to watch me play, then bought me a hot chocolate and said something nice even if I hadn’t played well. I never had the feeling that how I played had anything to do with how she felt about me. If I ever get my hands on that Cup she’s the first person I’m passing it to.

  * * *

  There was a bus to take us to the Saturday-morning skate. But the rink—the 21,273-seat Bell Centre—is only a few blocks from the hotel, so Cam and I walked. Instead of going in through the players’ entrance we detoured into the box-office lobby to see a reproduction of the Canadiens’ dressing room the way it was in the old Montreal Forum. The display includes the famous sign painted on the dressing-room wall under pictures of the Canadiens players elected to the Hall of Fame. The sign reads: “Nos bras meutris vous tendent le flambeau, a vous toujours de le porter bien haut!” and under that the English translation: “To you from failing hands we throw the torch, be yours to hold it high.”

  Hockey is serious business in Montreal.

  * * *

  The Canadiens hammered us 6–2. It was old-fashioned fire wagon hockey. They skated us into the ground. One play—their fourth goal, late in the second period—pretty much captures the way Montreal used to play and, sometimes, still does. Tim Harcourt beat Quigley to the puck in the corner, and just before Quig drilled him, Harcourt passed to a breaking right winger, who head-manned it to the center, and all of a sudden I’m looking at a three-on-two. The center dropped it for the trailing left winger, who one-timed a shot that beat me top shelf. Tic. Tac. Toe. And everything at full speed. Say this for the Canadiens: they play the game the way it should be played. Except for that pest Reggie Harper. The guy dives like a soccer player. Late in the second period Harper was rushing the puck with Quigley back-checking on him and closing. Quig reached ahead with his stick to play the puck but Quig’s stick brushed Harper’s leg and Harper fell to the ice like he was shot with an assault rifle. The ref whistled Quig for a tripping penalty and Harper got to his feet smirking. “You know what you guys are doing?” Quig yelled at the ref. “You’re rewarding dishonor.” At least it took the smirk off of Harper’s face. But Montreal scored on the power play. Sometimes dishonor wins.

  After the game, Cam said something to me about none of my pregame rituals bringing me any luck. But that doesn’t stop me from doing them. At the start of every game I use the tip of my right skate blade to make a small Sign of the Cross on the ice. I know that sounds hypocritical. And neurotic. But it’s something I’ve done since high school. I also put on my equipment the same way I did in high school—left side first—and I tap both posts and the crossbar with my stick before warm-ups. I find safety in ritual. It’s calming because what you do next is predetermined, whereas in a game you’re forced to react to others or make them react to you. Or maybe I just don’t like surprises. Or anything I can’t control.

  * * *

  In the two games before Thanksgiving we beat Vancouver 3–2 at home then got shut out 2–0 in Toronto. “Lack of oh-fense is killing the Bruins, eh?” as one Toronto sports talk radio guy put it.

  Packy disappointed me in Toronto. In his pregame talk—which I think should be about Xs and Os and who’s matched up against whom—he said we wanted to head into the Thanksgiving break with a win and then rambled on about Thanksgiving being a great family day and then—the oldest coach’s cliché in the book—about how our team is like a family and we have to support each other and watch each other’s backs. That family stuff is a crock. In the first place, most of our guys are Canadian, and Canada’s Thanksgiving is in October. And it’s not as if we didn’t know why we’d gotten on a plane and flown to Toronto. The family metaphor in pro sports is ridiculous. Family members don’t get cut, traded, waived, benched, or sent to the minors. A team isn’t remotely like a family, but coaches in all sports and at all levels keep saying it is. Hockey at our level is a business. While Packy was talking most of us stared at the floor, embarrassed for him.

  * * *

  My mother and grandmother arrived Wednesday afternoon shortly after I got home from practice. Faith was there, too. She planned to have dinner with my family and me on Wednesday, then join her family in Cambridge on Thanksgiving. Faith had met my mother a couple of times at the University of Vermont. “It’s been a long time, Mrs. Savard,” Faith said.

  “Jacqueline, please,” my mother said, pronouncing her name Jacque-LYN, with a soft J and the accent on the last syllable in the Quebec way and not JAC-kwi-lyn, with a hard J, the way most Americans pronounce it.

  My grandmother’s name is Huguette but I’ve always called her Mammam. My grandmother went immediately to the kitchen and began searching the cupboards and the fridge to see what she’d cook for dinner. I told her that Faith and I could make dinner but my grandmother wouldn’t hear of it. I think she feels as important in the kitchen as I do in goal. But it wasn’t too long before Mammam came into the living room and sat on the couch, wheezing. “I get tired,” she said.

  “The doctor says her heart’s weakening,” my mother said after Mammam went back to the kitchen. “He gave her blood thinners and a bunch of other pills but they don’t seem to do much good.”

  Faith told me later that my grandmother probably suffered from congestive heart failure. “The pump breaks down after seventy or eighty years,” she said.

  Mammam was born in Laval, just outside of Montreal. She was six years old when her parents moved to New England. They were among the nearly one million French Quebeckers who moved to the United States between 1830 and 1930. Most came to escape hardscrabble farming or the slums and poverty of life in the working-class sections of Montreal. The arriving French found year-round jobs in New England’s mills, factories, and forests. And when they came they brought hockey with them.

  Heart trouble or not, Mammam could still wheel in the kitchen. My mother brought in a cooler containing one of my grandmother’s tourtières—the traditional Quebec meat pie made of ground pork and beef with potatoes and spices—and a bean pot half full of Mammam’s baked beans made with molasses, dark brown sugar, pieces of onion, and salt pork. It’s poor people’s food but it’s what I grew up eating and I still love it.

  Fortunately, my grandmother, tired from the trip, went to bed early. That’s when Faith gave us some much-needed comic relief. Digging deep into her handbag, she came up with, “Ta-da … A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving,” she said, holding up the DVD. Then, reaching into the bag again, she pulled out a jar of popcorn. We made a large communal bowl of popcorn and watch
ed the movie. I laughed at the scene where Snoopy gets tangled in a folding beach chair. I think that scene is a metaphor for life—you can’t always make it unfold the way you know it’s supposed to.

  Faith left early to drive to her parents’ house and I wanted to turn in early because we had practice in the morning. I asked my mother what her plans were for taking care of Mammam when her heart got worse. I told her I’d cover the costs.

  “I’ll keep her home as long as I can,” my mother said. “I don’t want to put her in a nursing home. But I’m too tired to talk about it tonight.”

  My mother’s got a right to be tired. She worked full-time in the grocery store until I signed with the Bruins. She scheduled all of the cashiers and baggers. She hired me for a couple of summers. That probably looked like nepotism until, in my first week on the job, she suspended me for a day. That happened when Mrs. Chevalier asked me, “Where can I find cereal, young man?” And I said, “In the cereal aisle.”

  My mother is fifty-one and still attractive. She’s what people of her generation call “a handsome woman”—tall and thin with long legs and highlighted blond hair that refuses to turn gray. She usually wears it in a chignon, a carryover from her working days. It gives her an all-business look.

  After we moved back to Maine she went on dates but she always came home. I’d wake up for a few seconds when she opened the front door. I suppose she got her sexual needs taken care of but I never thought of that then and don’t like to think of it now. She never went on a trip with a guy and never did anything to make me feel I was going to be relegated to second place.

  * * *

  I missed my tenth consecutive Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade telecast because of our usual Thanksgiving morning practice. We’d been skating for three months by then, so I didn’t really think we needed the ice time. But Packy knew that if we got a day off, then lost on Friday, he’d leave himself open to criticism by fans and media. Coaches in all sports deny it but I think they make a lot of their decisions defensively based on what fans and the media might say.

  We nonchalanted it through practice. Or the so-called players did. The NHL rule book distinguishes between players and goalies as if goalies are, somehow, less than players or different from players. One difference is that goalies can’t coast through practice as easily as players. You’re forced to react to the shots taken at you, and when you have twenty-two players and a couple of dozen pucks you’re going to face a few hundred shots. Rinky Higgins and I worked hard in practice but we were the only two who did.

  The most emotion the other guys showed was when we came back into the room and saw the big trunk containing what’s called our third alternate jersey. Instead of wearing our usual game shirts with the spoked B on the chest—one of the game’s oldest and most respected logos—for Friday afternoon’s game we were going to have to wear a gold jersey with the head of a bear who looks like Winnie the Pooh’s stoner grandfather. Cam held up one of the shirts at arm’s length and said, “What it lacks in ferocious panache it more than makes up for in cuddly insouciance.”

  We hate the goddamn shirts but Gabe Vogel loves them because it means hard-core fans who already own our home and away shirts will shell out another $200 for the third alternate shirt. Every team does this. And most of the older teams also have retro shirts based on designs of fifty years ago. I wouldn’t fall for that if I were a parent or a fan.

  * * *

  Cam’s father invited my mother to watch the game from the Carter & Peabody luxury suite. I’d arranged for a nurse to stay home with Mammam so my mother could relax and enjoy her afternoon. Sort of. “I’m proud of what you do but I don’t like watching you do it. I worry. Goalies get too much blame,” she’s told me dozens of times. We also get too much credit.

  My mother watches all of our games on cable TV but it makes a difference to me when I know she’s in the building. I mentioned this to Cam in the dressing room before the game and he said, “For Christ’s sake, JP, how many NHL players still care about what Mommy and Daddy think?”

  “All of us,” said Kevin Quigley, who’d overheard the question.

  I didn’t play great but I was adequate and we beat Tampa Bay 6–3. Rex Conway scored the fourth goal—the game winner—when his shot from a bad angle bounced in off Tampa defenseman Igor Brashinsky. Lynne Abbott asked Rex about the goal and of course Rex launched into his sermon about “I have to give a big assist to the Man Upstairs,” which is when Lynne snapped off her tape recorder and said, “The assist went to Quigley and the goddamn shot went in off Igor Brashinsky’s butt, for Christ’s sake, Rex.”

  “The Lord works in mysterious ways, Lynne,” Rex said.

  Cam’s dad took a bunch of us to a pricey steak house for an early dinner after the game. “Detroit and Dallas won and covered yesterday. The Deuce is feeling flush,” said Cam. Technically, Cam’s dad is Cameron Cabot Carter Jr. but he hates the word “Junior” so we sometimes call him the Deuce. He likes that. Besides Cam and his parents, our party included Tamara, my mother, Faith, Lindsey Carter (who seemed almost as happy to be with us as she was that Caitlin was home with a babysitter), me, and a surprise starter—Cam’s and my agent, Denny Moran. Denny’s a good guy. Midfifties, divorced for as long as I’ve known him. His ex-wife loved Denny’s ex–best friend more than she loved Denny. It made him distrustful of wives and friends and helped turn him into a workaholic. Denny’s a good-looking guy in an aging Robert Redford sort of way. And he’s honest and ethical. But that’s not to say I wanted him hitting on my mother. I think he hip checked Lindsey and almost broke a couple of chairs trying to sit next to my mom. First Denny tried a few conversational gambits about the game and how proud she must be of me and so forth. Then he blew himself up. “So, Jackie,” he started a sentence.

  “Jacqueline, please,” my mother said in a voice colder than Nome.

  When Cam heard that he pulled in his chest like a batter avoiding a high fastball. I thought I was the only one who saw the gesture but Faith leaned over as if to pick up a napkin and whispered to me, “So much for Denny crowding the plate.”

  When Cam’s father got the check he reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a small leather-bound book embossed with the words “Business Journal.” He uses it to keep track of his expenses for tax deductions.

  “What’s that, Grandpa Carter?” Lindsey asked.

  “This,” said Cam’s father, holding up the book, “is the greatest work of fiction in the English language.” I like the Deuce.

  As we left the restaurant, Faith and I found ourselves walking together and out of earshot of everyone else. She asked me why I seemed so happy that my mother had brushed back Denny Moran. I said I didn’t know but maybe it was a habitual reaction left over from childhood.

  “Well I think your mom knows you feel that way. So don’t.”

  “Don’t what?”

  “Don’t feel that way.”

  “Can’t help it.”

  “Can too.”

  “Can not. And why should I?”

  “Because your mother deserves it,” she said. “And because you’re not eleven years old anymore.”

  * * *

  My mother and Mammam left on Saturday morning before I went to practice. “We’ll see you at Christmas, Jean Pierre,” my mother said. Then the verdict came down. “I like Faith very much” was all she said. But she’d never said anything—good or bad—about Sheri the Equestrienne or Missy Taylor the New England Patriots Dance Team Coordinator or any of the women I’d introduced her to since Lisa.

  We had noon ice at the Garden and then a charter flight to Philly for a Sunday-night game with the Flyers. I hate playing in Philly. Toughest fans in the league, maybe in the world, not counting German soccer hooligans. Cam and I were walking from the Philly airport terminal to our bus when a kid maybe fifteen years old and standing about fifty feet away recognized me and yelled, “Hey, you JP Savard?”

  “Guilty,” I said.

  “You suck!�
� the kid yelled. “Flyers gonna kick your fuckin’ ass!”

  “Welcome to Philly, the town that booed Santa Claus,” Cam said, and told me the story of Santa Claus being booed and pelted with snowballs during halftime of a Philadelphia Eagles football game years ago.

  We beat the Flyers 3–2 in a meat grinder of a game marred for me only by Serge “the Weasel” Balon scoring a garbage goal. I was juggling a shot that bounced off of my chest when Balon bunted the puck to the ice with his stick, then backhanded it into the net. The way he chopped at me I thought the ref could’ve whistled him for slashing. I also think I should have handled the first shot cleanly. But that wasn’t the bad part. On his next shift, with the face-off to my right, Balon looked over and winked at me. A TV camera caught it, so it was all over the sports news and highlight shows. Pisses me off just thinking about it.

  We chartered back to Boston after the game. Cold rain driven by a northeast wind lashed the tarmac as we touched down at one in the morning. I’d heard weather reports about a cold front sweeping in behind the rain. It’s after Thanksgiving that we enter the heart of the season. Training camp and the first two months of the schedule seem like so much overture. Spring and the playoffs—if we make them—lie unreachably far away. It’s the dark cold time when, as Lisa used to say, “you have to carry your sunshine around with you.” I’m not good at that.