Black Bird (9 page)

They stared over the banister as she ran out the front door, slamming it in her wake. Father entered from the kitchen, where he’d come up from the basement. He stood in the hall, looking from the door up to the landing where the rest of them gazed down. “Was that Marie? I missed her.”

Outside, the snow began to fall again.

At the library, Jean-Baptiste returned some American novels that had only depressed him, and exchanged them for novels from France. He had bad luck with the Americans, who despite the lavish accolades printed on their back covers, seemed somehow false, precious; so strained in their attempt to be literary that only other Americans could fail to see that the emperor had no clothes.

He sat at his leisure in the library’s greenhouse, daylight filtering through the snow-covered glass roofs and the extravagant, enormous leaves of the tropical palms down onto the pages before him. As soon as he began to read—Flaubert, Camus, Voltaire—he was comforted, soothed and cheered by the ease and the grace that poured out of these French writers and lay
still and tranquil on the page, as if warm in their beds, while the storm raged, impotent, outside.

When it pleased him, he was so relaxed in the act of reading that he lost track of the words themselves. He didn’t see the printed pages but saw right into the action of the text, not as if looking at images or as if dreaming, but as if the pages were fields of space in which another kind of existence held sway; an existence that engulfed him as completely and convincingly as reality, and one subject only to the powers of the words themselves. Adjectives tumbled into one another, displacing sedentary nouns; modifiers soothed and slackened the sharp verbs; metaphors invisibly bridged the gap between pages; phrases and tropes ran circles around subjects.

Briefly, a pang of guilt crossed Jean-Baptiste’s mind as he remembered he was reading English translations. Time and again he’d regretted not being master of his paternal tongue. Time and again he’d wondered if, as much as he identified with these interpreted French words, wouldn’t he be so much more consumed by them in the original? Ironic, then, that he was so close to and so comfortable with the English language that when reading its writers, he could spot in an instant, in only a phrase, in merely a few words of a sentence, all of the author’s conceits, all of the author’s frustrated hours poured into an attempt to look at ease and in command of the broad, swaggering, American tongue, but tripping over his own idiom by bending his tools to insignificant subjects and overworked commonplaces.

No wonder it was so hard for his own works to find their way into American, Canadian or even local journals. For not only had he no desire to write in the acceptable North American manner, but he realized he had no desire to read those works either. That no matter how much attention these works received, no matter how highly they were praised, by no matter what authorities, they still seemed to him sterile, empty, somehow not genuine. It was as if all those involved in the enterprise—the publishers, the writers, the reviewers and even the readers—were somehow fooling themselves. As if they were all engaged in a mutual hallucination of meaning.

What a funny, awkward place to stand, between two languages, as if he had one foot on each rail of a train’s track. He admitted: he disliked novels written in English, but he couldn’t read those written in French.

Mother tongue English, father tongue French. Both solitudes. English was feminine, welcoming, mothering—but also guttural, Germanic, a precise and at the same time crude language full of words and phrases stolen from others to shore up its own metaphorical poverty. French was the father: always disappointed, always driving, always stern, always ambiguous, always fighting to beat down the Oedipus in the son—but at the same time, French was so fluid, so romantic, so Latin and Mediterranean, so sunshine and Eros.

In the greenhouse, lost in
The Temptation of Saint Anthony
, among the towering palms and lush undergrowth, with the rich, sweet smell of the earth and the
moist, warm air enveloping him, he was sheltered from the Arctic winds battering the city, from the droning growl of the heavy plows, and from the cloying and musty smells of Aline’s heavy cooking.

Since it was now an established fact that Mother’s friends would visit several times a week, Father made the effort to put the front parlour into a condition to receive guests. The furniture was removed, the floor swept and washed, the imitation oriental rug unrolled after so many months, and the nesting spiders relocated into oblivion. Finally, the furniture made its return, in a new arrangement supervised by Aline, who swooped down upon this chance to make a mark of her own on the house and revealed a startling capacity for self-assertion. She even suggested a new renovation project, that a door should be knocked out of the rear wall to provide direct access to the kitchen through the pantry and eliminate the need to carry trays up and down the long hallway. There was an idea for Father to ponder.

Mrs. Harrison arrived amidst a cloud of tobacco smoke, frail and bent as driftwood, mumbling her hellos and putting out an arm to steady herself in the hall. She was so small she needed Aline’s help to hang her cloth coat up on the hook. Mrs. Pangloss, who had never been shy of showing her hostility to Grandfather, and who had already had the news of his
misfortune, reacted by storming in as if she were home, quoting the Bible. Just as Aline was bringing in the tea, she bellowed, “An eye for an eye, my dears. The Lord gives us what we deserve,” and nodded her head vigorously in agreement with herself. Aline, who only half understood what had been said, was frightened by the remark because it stung her with the memory of her own words to Grandfather.

When Mrs. Harrison ventured that her remark “wasn’t very nice,” Mrs. Pangloss replied that the Lord was not obliged to be nice, on account of his mysterious ways. Mrs. Pangloss never hesitated to identify her own will with that of the Lord because there were always plenty of people—Father Pheley, for instance, or any number of doctors, or many of her fellow callers to phone-in radio shows—who readily agreed with her quick grasp of that clearly defined line between right and wrong. Though truth to tell, it’s possible some of them had simply learned the futility of argument. And speaking of doctors, had Mother yet been to see her own regarding her over-long mourning?

Mother’s eyes rose to meet Mrs. Pangloss’s gaze. Had it been that long? Just how long had it been?

A cigarette quivering in her outstretched hand, Mrs. Harrison said, “Leave her be,” as best she could while trying to retain her ill-fitting dentures. Clacking them into place, she continued, “Everybody’s different. She needs her time.”

“Maybe you should talk to Father Pheley,” insisted Mrs. Pangloss, who, although she knew her friend to
be Presbyterian, felt everyone ought to be Catholic and refused to believe those disgraceful rumours about the Church and its servants. “He’ll put you right.”

As if there were something wrong with me, thought Mother. She remembered the rumours all too well—Angus had been fond of referring to them—and the incident in Marie’s childhood.

“He’s Catholic,” objected Mrs. Harrison, puffing.

“You old fool, of course he’s Catholic. He’s a priest.” Mrs. Pangloss’s temper rose with her exasperation. How anyone could tolerate that brainless harridan was beyond her.

“She should burn sandalwood.” By now, the two were speaking as if Mother were absent.

Mrs. Pangloss pulled herself erect with a hand on her hip, tilting her head. “What in God’s name are you talking about?”

“It’d make her feel better. The smell. It smells good.”

“Fer crying out loud.” Pangloss paused. “You think smelling up the house will make anyone feel good? That’s for witches. That’ll give her a headache.”

“I saw it on TV.”

“Oh, it must have been a horror show.”

“No, it was Mass. From Rome. The Pope. The Pope.”

For once Mrs. Pangloss was silent.

“He’s
a priest,” said Mrs. Harrison.

Mrs. Pangloss continued to encourage Mother to see a doctor, because although she still believed that whatever took place was the will of God, she was not a Mormon, and thought that doctors were also the will of God because many of them had told her so. While no one else thought this line of reasoning made any sense, everyone agreed a visit to the doctor—any trip out of the house—would probably do her some good. Mother finally cracked under the pressure and went to her family physician.

Dr. Hyde hadn’t seen her since he’d delivered her of twins, and so happily went about a battery of tests when Mother couldn’t be more specific than to say she felt “under the weather.” He made her undress and weighed and measured her; he took her blood pressure and her temperature. He had her pee into a cup; he examined her urine as closely as he could. He examined her breasts for lumps. He wasn’t sure, so it took a long time. He made her put her feet into the stirrups and bent into her with cold, dry implements. He was thorough. He put on rubber gloves, which he lubricated, and was more thorough. Finally, as she lay with her legs still spread into the air, he simply stood and stared at her for such a long time that she slowly turned completely red; and then, just as slowly, she resumed her natural colour; and then she began to worry. At last he announced he could find nothing wrong with her.

Why then did she feel so out of sorts? Gently, the doctor tried to suggest she was just having trouble accepting her grief, and therefore was, well, mentally unbalanced. Perhaps she simply needed some rest.
In any case, he would do for her what he did for everyone when he had no idea what was wrong with them: prescribe tranquillizers.

The small square of paper he handed her at least made Mother feel she hadn’t endured the whole ordeal for nothing. But
unbalanced?
She was puzzled and tried to decide how that could be. It was a fact that since she was a small girl, she had developed the habit of sleeping on a different side each night. Because Angus had tried to raise her with a sense of regularity, she took to sleeping on her right side on even-numbered nights, and her left on odd-numbered nights. But suddenly she realized that the calendar is mostly made up of odd-numbered days. Whenever the thirty-first came along, she would sleep on her left side. But the next day, the first, was also an odd day. So in fact she had been sleeping more often on one side than the other. She realized that all these years of asymmetrical sleeping must have made her brain slide around in her head, until now it wasn’t sitting straight in her skull. The doctor was right: she was mentally unbalanced.

What to do about it? Well, he’d said rest, and given her tranquillizers. Obviously she needed to correct the imbalance. She would go straight home and start sleeping on her right side, regardless of whether it was an odd or an even day. And she would sleep until she had regained her mental equilibrium.

It took quite some time.

Uncle was introduced to his first dog when he was only a child. Fittingly it was just a puppy itself, and he hated it instantly because it refused to be paper trained. But taking it for a walk was something of a pleasure, if only to get away from a house which even then abutted on the funeral parlour on one side, and a crazy woman’s on the other.