Serafim and Claire (5 page)

Montréal, le 11 mai 1915
À Monsieur le Directeur de l'École Frontenac de St-Eusèbe

Monsieur,

I would like to request your understanding, sir, that both my daughters, Claire and Cécile Audette, are excused from their studies the entirety of the day tomorrow.

This is necessary for private and grave family matters. I thank you to your discretion and of your understanding.

Veuillez agrée, Monsieur, l'expression de nos sentiments distinguées.

Madame Marie Audette

As a child,
when Claire went out in public, it was often alone with her father. At the youngest age, her parents could see that she loved, even needed, to be the centre of attention, wedging her way through the tall forest of adult legs wherever they had planted themselves, clearing herself a space at their centre, and proceeding to put on some kind of a show. It often involved spinning, singing, running on the spot, madly fanning her skirts up and down, and ended with her hands stretched high, waiting, fingers splayed. The adults knew to clap, and Claire knew to bow. For precisely this reason, her mother, who hated drawing undue notice to herself, chose (at least whenever she had to run errands with the children in tow) to take Cécile and Daniel with her, passing Claire off to her father, who had no problem whatsoever with her madcap scenes and charades.

Claire's father even encouraged her wild antics, doting on her shamelessly; pulling her along on a sled in the winter, the metal runners grating on patches of asphalt as they crossed the streets, sometimes stopping to carry both her and the sled across, just to ease her pristine ears; taking her to Parc Sohmer — an American-style open-air amusement park for the working class in the east end — lifting her on and off five or six animals on the carousel until she'd found just the right one for her; or propping her up at the window of every vehicle they travelled in, allowing her to point and exclaim and squeal at the ecstatic world she always seemed to see passing by like a parade on display just for her.

On this particular day, they were on St. Lawrence Boulevard (
la Main
as it was known) with the aim of going to a nickelodeon, which always proved to be a hit with Claire, who adored the moving pictures. She would sit with her hands on the seat in front of her, rapt by the music of the piano player stationed only two rows away, who interpreted the tension or glee of each scene as it rolled through, with his eyes on the screen instead of the keys. They'd already chosen which nickelodeon, and what they wanted to see, but were forced to wait fifteen minutes outside before the next showing. It was August 1912, Claire was nine, and the street was teeming with life. Men in straw hats and jackets and women in large and convoluted dresses walked arm in arm along the sidewalks. The grunt and wheeze of an organ grinder cranked out a jumpy tune. Carriages and buggies passed between the streetcars. A group of adolescent boys scurried by, fleeing from some random act of mischief.

Claire's father caught the sound of a handbell from a corn vendor across the street. “
Blé d'Inde! Blé d'Inde
!
” called out the vendor, directly at them, having apparently read their minds. It was the poor man's version of sweets for his children, a few pennies getting you an ear of corn, buttered, salted, and wrapped in grease-resistant paper, which folded in wrinkles that soon looked like tiny mouths watering delectably.

“
Tu veux du blé d'Ind
e
?” her father asked. And with her elated nod he was off, gesturing for her to stay put as he threaded his way across the street, through the clopping carriages and grumbling trams.

On Claire's left, a young woman squeaked with laughter, while a group of men postured in a tight circle around her. Claire stepped towards them, unconsciously, as if they were gathered there for her arrival. But before she could make her entrance, a door swung open to a theatre beside her, and out of it spilled the musical sounds of horns, drums, and cymbals. As the door began shutting on its slow hinges, Claire moved towards the sounds and soon found herself in a dark lobby, where she passed unknowingly beneath a ticket window, undetected. She approached two ushers, who were so engrossed in their conversation that she passed behind them, unseen. Then, still following the music, she pried her way between two slats of a heavy black curtain and stepped into the theatre.

That was when Claire saw her. A young woman on the stage, alone, dancing, a delicate cane in her hand, waving and tipping it like a scale in perfect equilibrium. The stage was dark, a bright orb of light following the dancer like an eye of blinding intensity. She was wearing a low-cut orange dress with lace straps that bared much of her torso. Ruffles and pleats billowed out from her narrow waist, ending just above her slender, cream-white calves. The music she was dancing to was light and cheerful, but her movements were not. She was lagging to the music, tugging a kind of melancholic tension through her steps and sways. The audience was silent, intent, captivated. Claire, entranced, wanted to be closer to her, and continued down the aisle, stopping periodically to watch what the dancer might do next. It was then that the vaudevillian did something shocking.

She noticed Claire beyond the beam of her spotlight, a nine-year-old girl standing in the passageway, a rogue element, an escapee, and locked eyes with her. The young woman was now dancing
for
her, smiling sadly, all while she possessed the entire theatre, holding the audience's concentration, their wonder, their reverence. Holding it all, holding the world, in balance, on the tip of her cane, the slanting shaft rolling it around playfully, assertively. She could do no wrong. She had even earned their forgiveness.

The mesmeric act finally came to an end, the abrupt lights that blanketed the stage seeming to scare up a flock of countless birds, everyone clapping, frantic, like innumerable sets of wings lifting every patron to their feet, chirping and whistling out. The woman blushed with false modesty, and exited stage left.

Out of nowhere, Claire felt a pair of hands on her shoulders, and turned around to a bombardment of questions. Where are your parents? Do you know someone here? How did you get into the theatre? But Claire didn't want this. What she wanted was for the music to go on, and for the young woman to come out and dance again, then again after that. She wanted her to dance forever. A group of people had now gathered around, crouching on their knees, pressing her for answers. She covered her ears and began to cry.

By the time it became clear that Claire had wandered in off the street, the ushers were sent (after a firm reprimand) out onto the Main to look for a panicked parent of some kind. It took them quite a while to locate her father, as he had been dashing in and out of stores and restaurants, unnerved and flustered, searching with crazed inefficiency, until finally asking a policeman to dismount and help him out. Claire hadn't been reunited with her father for more than thirty seconds before she started rambling on excitedly about what she'd seen. Her father, however, didn't quite seem to comprehend her excitement. What concerned him was that this entire incident be kept, at all costs, from Claire's mother. Claire agreed to keep her visit to the theatre a secret. She could keep a secret, she promised. Then she asked him about dance classes.

There was another time in Claire's life when she was lost, another event that proved how the world was an uncomplicated, glorious place; a place that brimmed with marvel and awe; with splendour that blossomed like weeds, unexpectedly, from the most unlikely cracks and corners.

When she was twelve and Cécile was fifteen and in her last year of school, they took the tram together in the mornings and evenings, sitting as close to each other as they could, though Cécile would jostle with her nose in a book while Claire would make her way to an open window and stick her face out, the city wind blowing the dark of her hair into elated wisps.

It was spring, almost a year into the Great War, and Claire was tapping her feet at the corner of the schoolyard where she and Cécile met every day before heading home together. On this day, however, something was awry, and Claire watched Cécile as she marched towards her through the schoolyard, cutting a straight line between the dispersing students, livid. She stomped to a halt and explained how one of her teachers had kept her after class, and had severely scolded her for speaking out in a “deviant way.”

Cécile had had the gall to ask the teacher about a scandal that had erupted a year earlier, when the daughter of a prominent citizen had ridden a horse
astride
on Sherbrooke Street — which, at the time, had caused more of a sensation than the assassination of the archduke in Sarajevo. In response, the teacher calmly asserted that it was a scandal because part of a woman's important role in the home was to uphold that which was proper and right, and to be an inspiration, a living example of a model citizen, when she was in public. Cécile then raised her hand to point out that this didn't seem very “emancipated.” (This was a word her grandmother had been throwing around with great vigour at the time, and Cécile was glad finally to be able to use it.) The teacher demanded that Cécile stay after class.

When the other students had cleared out, Cécile was chastised for her impudence. The teacher told her that she, Mademoiselle Audette, appeared to think of herself as a scholar of some sort, a woman of letters, an authority. Which, the teacher had said, was not only an untoward image, but an unlikely one — laughable even. True, Cécile wrote compositions with enthusiasm and intensity, but she was overconfident as to their worth. All the scribblings in the world, if written by an insolent girl, would have no bearing on anything, would bring about no change, not even the slightest. “Now, Mademoiselle Audette,” the teacher had said, “I advise you to remember your place. You are excused.”

Cécile borrowed a pencil and a piece of paper from Claire's school bag and sat down on the curb. “Don't you see? She's stupid. And wrong. I will write a letter that proves it. It will change things for us. Slightly. Would you like to take the day off with me tomorrow, go and get lost somewhere, do whatever we want?”

Claire bit her lip to hold back a smile that threatened to unbutton her cheeks. Without answering, she began to skip in circles around her sister, while Cécile began her letter. When she was finished, she went back into the school, handed the forged note to the principal with submissiveness and gratitude for his understanding, and walked back out, swaggering, a vindicated heroine. Linking arms with Claire, they headed towards their tram stop. “I think, tomorrow, we should find a place down by the river, in the morning sun. You?”

Claire threw back her head and laughed.

The next day, a Wednesday, turned out to be the warmest day of the month. They rode their usual tram, toting their usual bookbags, and then watched as their usual stop for school lurched past, shrinking in size and importance behind them. Smiling uncontrollably, they got off the tram and descended the cobblestone slope towards the river, and stepped into the liveliness and commotion of the port. The girls walked past elephantine ships, giggling at the famously blasphemous
débardeurs
— the seasonal boat loaders and freight handlers — their every word either a Québécois vulgarity or the English terminology used in their métier: winch, sling, cable, shed. “
Câlice de crisse de tabarnak
.
C'est un
job tough
aujourd'hui
,
hein
!
” One of them paused, straightened, whistling a wave at Cécile, who, on that day anyway, waved back with a shy smile.

The two sisters soon made their way far enough past the port that they could hear only its loudest noises: a locomotive colliding into a set of railway cars to link them together, a massive crate being dropped a foot from the ground. They found a patch of yellow grass on the bank of the St. Lawrence that was just beginning to blush with the green of springtime. They lay down, crossed their feet, put their hands behind their heads, and looked up at the clear concave sky above them, which appeared to flex and strain against the walls of its own shell until it seemed ready to crack.

As the day dawdled along, Cécile read her books, mostly novels from France, which thankfully had nothing to do with Catholic morality, in the way that almost all Quebec literature did; while Claire danced to the music in her head, practising a discipline that the nuns in her elementary school, which she'd thankfully left behind the previous year, detested, grumbling that dance was the only art in history that had — and
could
have — nothing at all to do with Catholic morality.

The girls were both unquestionably free. Both magnificently lost.

Claire spun in circles, listening to the notes of songbirds that were amassing in the shrubs around them, their archaic orchestra, a springtime crescendo of new and verdant voices. Looking up, she noticed a few flocks of geese returning in alphabetical formations up the seaway. Claire held her breath, faced the zenith of birds, her arms out wide, and jumped, straight up, as high as she could.

Claire couldn't help but smile while recalling these two childhood episodes from her hospital bed. A nun at the far side of the room glanced over at her, and Claire's smile faded.

Feigning an inability to understand one's mother tongue presented a lot of problems for Claire in the hospital. She had to be constantly on her guard, especially as the nuns at the Hôtel-Dieu instinctively (or maybe just because they suspected something wasn't quite right with her) asked her questions in French first. Claire perfectly understood their requests and queries but pretended she hadn't, grimacing as if she were hard of hearing, shaking her head, and pointing into her ear as if to imply that it was a physical phenomenon, that, sadly, only English words could filter through to register on her eardrums. It was an unconvincing act, and one the nuns had just enough patience to tolerate.

Claire realized that Dr. Bertrand had certainly been thinking on his toes when he made up the story of her being Irish. She could appreciate the way this fallacy automatically explained any discrepancies that might come up, at the same time keeping the nuns' questions plain and direct, so they were unable to pry into her life. She was grateful for what the doctor had done for her, and in more than a few ways.